Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon Page 19

  DAVID BENIOFF: He’s like the bridezilla. Weddings bring out the worst in a lot of people, and this is supposed to be a showcase of his power. His sigil is everywhere. He’s wearing his finest clothes. He invited the most powerful people. And, of course, it all goes terribly wrong.

  ALEX GRAVES: Things start to get weird, and you assume they’re going to get weird with Joffrey the way they always have—somebody is going to be the victim of Joffrey. He’s an unstable character in our minds. He’s like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. You have no idea what he’s going to do. Is this going to be the death of Tyrion? Is this gonna be the death of Sansa? It doesn’t occur to you that the strongest guy in the room is the one who’s gonna get it.

  Then Margaery jumped up with the show’s most hilarious non sequitur: “Look, the pie!”

  The viewer was relieved and thought the arrival of the enormous pastry might deescalate the tension. For a few moments, it did. Then Joffrey once again started into Tyrion. And ate pie. And gulped wine. And then . . . began to choke.

  Joffrey clutched his throat, convulsed, and collapsed, a tyrant reduced to a terrified boy.

  Originally, Joffrey’s death was going to be even more graphic. Martin’s script for the episode was unearthed by Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson, who noted the young king was initially supposed to slash his own face during his death throes.

  Joffrey’s death was perhaps Martin’s most ingenious twist. While the Red Wedding is considered the show’s most shocking moment, this scene—the one fans dubbed “the Purple Wedding” (because purple is associated with royalty)—is arguably more surprising. In a tale that had firmly established its unpredictability and disruption of traditional storytelling patterns, the last thing a Thrones viewer expected after a brutal massacre at a wedding was another major character’s death at yet another wedding. And the method of Joffrey’s death (poisoned, and without a clear culprit) denied fans the usual satisfaction of seeing a hero enacting justice upon a villain.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I based it a little on the death of Eustace, the son of King Stephen of England [who reigned during the twelfth century]. Stephen had usurped the crown from his cousin, the empress Maude. They fought a long civil war. Their anarchy was going to be passed onto the second generation, because Maude had a son and Stephen had a son. But Eustace choked to death at a feast. People are still debating one thousand years later: Did he choke to death, or was he poisoned? Because by removing Eustace, it brought about a peace that ended the English civil war.

  Eustace’s death was accepted [as accidental], and I think that’s what the murderers here were hoping for—that the whole realm would see Joffrey choke to death on a piece of pie or something. What they didn’t count on was Cersei’s immediate assumption that it was murder. Cersei wasn’t fooled for a second.

  DAVID BENIOFF: There’s something wonderful, reading the book, the way Joffrey dies, because it’s completely unexpected. There’s no hero coming back to vanquish the evil king. He’s not killed really as an act of vengeance. He’s killed for purely political reasons.

  DAN WEISS: There’s something anticlimactic about it. The standard move would be to give you a sense of release, a sense of happiness. The idea that somehow the moral calculus of the world has been made right and this person who’s had it coming for so long has finally gotten what he deserved.

  DAVID BENIOFF: It’s a character you’ve despised for so long and wanted to see him killed. Yet what you’re seeing is a young man, still a boy, really, choke to death—which is a horrible thing to witness. Even if it’s a character you hate, it’s almost impossible to block out that thing inside of you when somebody suffers terribly. We didn’t want this to be a stand-up-and-clap moment so much as a horrible death of a horrible person.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: There’s a moment there where he knows that he’s dying and he can’t get a breath and looking at his mother and at the other people in the hall with just terror and appeal in his eyes—“Help me, Mommy.” So I didn’t want it to be entirely, “Hey-ho, the witch is dead.” I wanted perhaps more complex feelings on the part of the audience. I don’t know that we should be cheering deaths in real life. We don’t want thirteen-year-old bullies to be put to death; sometimes people do regret their actions. But Joffrey will never get that chance, so we don’t know what he would have become. Probably nothing good, but still. . . .

  The episode ended with Cersei accusing Tyrion of killing her son and having him arrested. Yet there was another twist that took place off camera: Gleeson publicly revealed on the set that day that he was quitting acting.

  JACK GLEESON: The answer isn’t interesting or long-winded. I’ve been acting since age eight. I just stopped enjoying it as much as I did. It was the prospect of doing it for a living whereas up until then it was always something I did for recreation with my friends or in the summer for fun. [Acting as a career] changes your relationship with it. It’s not like I hate it; it’s just not what I want to do. I also found it slightly uncomfortable to see my face on a bus or a poster. I like just being known by my friends and family.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: I felt a little guilty that he quit acting. I hope that playing Joffrey didn’t make him want to retire from the profession, because he did have quite a gift for it.

  ESMÉ BIANCO: I saw him recently, and yeah, he’s not worked since. It’s sad in a sense, because he’s an amazing actor. At the same time, I’m like, you do you. Just do one outstanding role everybody is going to remember you for, then say, “Next . . .”

  That was supposed to be the end of Gleeson’s acting story—and this chapter. Then there was another unexpected turn of events. Just as this book was being completed, Gleeson, now twenty-seven, emerged from retirement and signed on to a six-episode BBC comedy titled Out of Her Mind. It will mark his first filmed role since Thrones. A return of the king.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Trial and Tribulations

  Tyrion Lannister drank, and he knew things, but he was perhaps most adept at getting himself captured. The Lannister was held captive six times on Game of Thrones by different aggrieved parties. In season one, Tyrion was held prisoner by Catelyn Stark and then Lysa Arryn. In season five, he was apprehended by Ser Jorah, then again by slave traders. And in the final season, he was locked up by Daenerys Targaryen. “I’m very well-acquainted with the prop guys who have to handcuff me every ten minutes,” Peter Dinklage once quipped on set.

  Yet Tyrion’s finest prisoner storyline was in season four, when he was falsely blamed for Joffrey’s murder. The arc was Thrones at its best: George R. R. Martin’s gripping plot dynamics combined with some of the show’s finest writing and performances. There were shocking twists, scenes intimate and epic, and a story driven by the well-established rival agendas of compelling characters.

  The quieter moments included a succession of players visiting Tyrion in his cell. The scenes leaned into season one’s accidental discovery of the power of “two-handers.” Dinklage’s favorite of these was one of the most unusual scenes in the show. In a speech penned by showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, Tyrion reminisced to Jaime about a “simple” cousin’s predilection for smashing beetles and how he became obsessed with trying to understand the boy’s madness. This was Tyrion mourning humanity’s capacity for unfathomable and nonsensical cruelty.

  “His face was like the page of a book written in a language I didn’t understand, but he wasn’t mindless, he had his reasons,” Tyrion said. “And I became possessed with knowing what they were. . . . I had to know because it was horrible, that all these beetles should be dying for no reason. . . . In my dreams, I found myself standing on a beach made of beetle husks stretching as far as the eye can see. I woke up, crying, weeping for their shattered little bodies.”

  PETER DINKLAGE (Tyrion Lannister): Many of those scenes in the jail cell defined all these different relationships in Tyrion’s life. I loved the scene with Nikolaj when we’re talking about our cousin. There’s s
o much in the show that’s necessary to push the story forward because everybody is just trying to stay alive. I loved the lines about the cousin being a bit thick and smashing the beetles just because. It was about something from their past. It’s like he’s in shock. He doesn’t know why he’s telling that story, and he just wants to know what it was about and what life is about. It had such an abstract non–fucking–King’s Landing feel to it. It was such a breath of fresh air. I loved that monologue. Whether I serviced it or not is a matter of opinion.

  While Tyrion awaited his fate down in the dreary black cells, Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman) got to know Margaery Tyrell up in his posh Red Keep bedchamber.

  Tyrell had set her sights on wooing the realm’s newly crowned boy-king, but during one scene, her flirtations were interrupted by Tommen’s cat, Ser Pounce. In George R. R. Martin’s novels, the young king has three black kittens (Ser Pounce, Boots, and Lady Whiskers). Co–executive producer Bryan Cogman thought it would be fun to have one of the cats make a quick cameo.

  BRYAN COGMAN (co–executive producer): Ser Pounce wasn’t in the outline. I said, “Dan, I’m getting Ser Pounce into the show!”

  The idea was simple: Tommen is in bed. Margaery sits beside him by candlelight. The romantic tension rises. Suddenly Ser Pounce leaps from the floor to the bed—pounces, if you will. Then Tommen says a line (“That’s Ser Pounce!”) and Margaery pets the cat as they continue to chat.

  All the cat had to do was jump up to the bed and then stay relatively still.

  BRYAN COGMAN: Ser Pounce was supposed to be a little dainty kitten. And then this giant-ass cat showed up. And then the cat wouldn’t do anything.

  For take after take, the team could not convince the cat to jump onto the bed on cue. Eventually, an off-screen crew member had to toss the cat up from the floor.

  BRYAN COGMAN: We never got the shot! You never see a shot of him jumping on the bed. He just appears on the bed. We never got the shot of him pouncing. To be fair, cats aren’t famous for taking direction.

  Then the cat wouldn’t stay still. Dormer had to firmly hold him while delivering her lines.

  NATALIE DORMER (Margaery Tyrell): That cat was a real diva. It was upstaging us at any given moment. We were all pulling out our hair. The cat would not do what it was supposed to short of pinning it down to the bed. We got one take that was halfway passable, and that was the one we used.

  BRYAN COGMAN: Natalie Dormer punched me in the arm at lunch—playfully, I should add. “Why the fuck is this cat a Sumo wrestler?”

  But this is one of the weird things about Game of Thrones: Ser Pounce then became an Internet sensation, and for no reason that I can state; the cat doesn’t do anything.

  The showrunners jokingly came up with an off-screen fate for Ser Pounce after Tommen committed suicide in season six.

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): Obviously Cersei hated the name “Ser Pounce” so much she could not allow him to survive. So she came up with her most diabolical [execution]. Ser Pounce’s death was so horrible we couldn’t even put it on the air.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): If you buy a super-extended, super-charged Game of Thrones box set, “The Death of Ser Pounce” will be in there. Just one whole episode devoted to the death of Ser Pounce.

  Cogman added that despite the on-set hassle, he’s rather proud of the scene, and noted that even the seeming randomness of Ser Pounce’s cameo had a purpose.

  BRYAN COGMAN: Ser Pounce is a great symbol of Tommen’s innocence, and it’s an organic way to get Tommen to talk about Joffrey and their complicated relationship. But there’s a reason you never saw Ser Pounce again.

  But eventually the royal family in King’s Landing had to turn to the far more serious matter of Tyrion’s trial for regicide.

  The episode “The Laws of Gods and Men” was the Thrones version of a traditional courtroom drama, with Tyrion accused of a crime that the audience knew he did not commit. Tyrion endured a procession of witnesses making accusations. Each claim was a kernel of truth stripped of its proper context and spun into damning evidence of his seeming guilt.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): Something I’ve tried to make a point of through the whole series is that decisions have consequences. One of Tyrion’s problems has been his big mouth. He said things since the beginning of the series, kind of veiled threats to Cersei, “Someday I’m going to get you for this, someday your joy is going to turn to ashes in your mouth.” All those declarations came back in a major way to make him look really guilty.

  Adding to the intrigue was that Margaery and Olenna Tyrell knew Tyrion was innocent.

  BRYAN COGMAN: Natalie was so much fun to watch. We know that Margaery knows who the murderer is, but she’s putting on airs, and Natalie is doing all of that behind her eyes.

  NATALIE DORMER: I mean, that’s all you can do. The beauty of it is in the cut. So many of the editors on the show are the unsung heroes, and that scene is a great example of how strong the editing is. The average Joe doesn’t always understand how imperative that is—the cutting of all the looks together.

  Even Cersei didn’t fully believe her brother was guilty.

  LENA HEADEY (Cersei Lannister): Cersei’s obviously disliked him since the beginning, since she holds him responsible for the death of their mother. She also believed—she didn’t really believe it but was happy to believe it because she could hate him more—that he murdered Joffrey.

  As for Tywin, the stone-faced patriarch didn’t know whether his son was guilty or not, actor Charles Dance told HBO’s Making Game of Thrones. “He isn’t entirely sure who is responsible but a scapegoat has to be found,” Dance said. For Tywin, the trial was more about manipulating Jaime into agreeing to quit the Kingsguard as part of their backroom plea deal in exchange for letting Tyrion live out the rest of his days at Castle Black.

  The trial’s showstopper moment came when Tyrion’s secret mistress, Shae, who he thought had safely fled Westeros, testified against him. Shae revealed their intimate moments and accused Tyrion of plotting with Sansa to kill Joffrey.

  BRYAN COGMAN: Every previous interaction with Tyrion and Shae was building to that moment in the courtroom.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: There were several actors who improved on their characters from the books, and I wish I could go back and write them better. The most conspicuous change was Sibel Kekilli playing Shae. The Shae in the books is a gold-digger camp follower. I have a certain amount of sympathy for her. She was probably abused or put into sexual service at a young age, and has been traveling around with the army. Tyrion picked her up. She’s using her sexuality for advancement and has no real affection for him. But the way David and Dan wrote her, and the way Sibel played her, is a character with far more depth, who had genuine feelings for Tyrion. My Shae would have never turned down the bag of diamonds that Varys offered her to leave.

  SIBEL KEKILLI (Shae): Our split-up scene was hard. Tyrion told her, “You’re a whore, just go away.” As Sibel Kekilli, I was feeling like Shae has to understand what’s going on. So I was struggling with it. I talked to Dan and David: “This is not my Shae; she has to get why Tyrion is behaving like this.” But I had to do what’s in the script. It was really hard to understand that scene, but I loved it. The trial was heartbreaking. I tried to put all of Shae’s humiliation into that moment to show her pain. It didn’t work. I think the fans hated Shae.

  Tyrion was devastated by Shae’s damning testimony. Despite having agreed to the deal with his father to plead guilty, something inside him snapped.

  BRYAN COGMAN: The Shae moment triggers what’s been building up inside him his entire life. He was going to take Tywin’s deal and go quietly. Now he’d rather die than give him that. But before he dies, he’s going to tell them all what he really thinks of them. He sticks it to his father, to Cersei, and to the crowd.

  In a speech adapted by Cogman, Tyrion raged: “I am guilty of a far more monstrous crime.
I am guilty of being a dwarf. . . . I’ve been on trial for that my entire life. . . . I did not kill Joffrey, but I wish that I had. Watching your vicious bastard die gave me more relief than a thousand lying whores. . . . I wish I had enough poison for the whole pack of you!”

  And if you thought Dinklage’s speech in the episode was searing, his first take on the material was even more volcanic.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU (Jaime Lannister): Peter went big for the first take of giving his speech at the trial. He “did it to the room,” if you will. They picked the take [for the episode] where he brought it down for the close-ups. But his first take was so raw, it was beautiful. All the hair stood up on your body, and you’re like, “This is amazing.”

  BRYAN COGMAN: The thing about Peter is there’s probably fifteen takes that we didn’t use that we could have slotted in and have an equally incredible and entirely different version of the same scene. The take they ended up using is not too over-the-top. I keep coming back to how piercing his gaze is throughout that speech; he’s just stabbing daggers into every person he’s talking to.

  PETER DINKLAGE: I served on jury duty a while back for a case that went on awhile, and it wasn’t dissimilar, because we had a whole week to shoot and I was up on that podium for like a week. It was a chance for Tyrion—without any bullshit, without any humor—to tell everybody [what he thought of them]. People say things about others in this show, down corridors and in bedrooms, and this was Tyrion’s moment to pull back that curtain and pull the ripcord on the whole Lannister legacy, and especially expose his father, things that have been stuffed down deep inside of him. He’s always dealt with things with humor and wit, but this time, enough’s enough. It would have been fine until the love of his life was brought into it. He would have taken the deal.