Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon Read online

  JASON MOMOA: It was all very extreme. You were either freezing or sweating. I was basically in leather pants. Sweating in leather pants is no fun. Freezing in leather pants is no fun. People would say [my role was] easy—“You’re just sitting there!” But it’s extremely hard to be intimidating and say everything but not say anything.

  One of my first scenes was when I rode up and I look down at Daenerys. I see her there, and I ride up and kind of make a grunt and take off. I remember a feeling washing over me like I have never had until that point in my acting career. I remember feeling very, very powerful. It was a cool moment to disappear into something with that big of a stature.

  Daenerys’s forced marriage to Drogo eventually blossomed into a more equitable romance, with Daenerys dubbing Drogo her “sun and stars.”

  Yet their first night together was one of the show’s most notorious scenes. In Martin’s book A Game of Thrones, and in the original pilot, Daenerys has consensual sex with Drogo on their wedding night. In the reshot version, Daenerys is the victim of marital rape.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN: Why did the wedding scene change from the consensual seduction scene that excited even a horse to the brutal rape of Emilia Clarke? We never discussed it. It made it worse, not better.

  Benioff and Weiss point out they filmed the version in the book, but they say the result didn’t translate well to the screen. One oft-overlooked plot point from the novel is that after their wedding night, Drogo harshly abuses Daenerys until she takes charge of their sex life. So in the first season’s original scripts, Daenerys was forced into a relationship with a stranger that rapidly progressed from an initial meeting, to consensual sex, to abusive sex, and then back to consensual again.

  DAVID BENIOFF (showrunner): Originally we scripted it pretty much exactly as the book, and we shot it that way for the pilot. While it worked in the book, seeing it on-screen, here’s a girl who is absolutely terrified of this barbarian warlord she’s being married off to, it’s the last thing in the world she wants, yet somehow by the end of this wedding night she seems to be in a complete joyful sexual relationship with him. It didn’t entirely work for us.

  DAN WEISS (showrunner): Also, in the second episode she has to go back to the less consensual, rougher relationship. In the book that works, but we just didn’t have that amount of time and access to the character’s mind. It turns too quickly. It was something the actors themselves felt wasn’t gelling. They weren’t able to find an emotional handhold.

  DAVID BENIOFF: When Emilia Clarke or Jason Momoa comes to us with something like this, we give it a lot of thought. It doesn’t always mean we change it, but Emilia mentioned the wedding night and the issues she was having with it, and that meshed with issues we were having ourselves.

  The scenes also required nudity, something Clarke has expressed mixed feelings about over the years. During our later on-set interviews, the actress staunchly defended nude scenes. (“This is all me, all proud, all strong,” she said after filming a season six scene where a bare Daenerys triumphantly emerges from the fiery destruction of Vaes Dothrak. “I’m just feeling genuinely happy I said yes [to the scene]. That ain’t no body double.”) But she’s also talked about feeling uncomfortable on the set—particularly during the show’s first season, when the production was still figuring out how to shoot scenes effectively, let alone sensitively. “Those were tough days,” she said, and on the Armchair Expert podcast added, “I’ve had fights on set before where I’m like, ‘No, the sheet stays up,’” while praising Momoa and Glen for being helpful and protective.

  IAIN GLEN: In moments when she felt exposed because of what she was required to do, I was always very protective of her on set, making sure that the protocol was followed and everyone knew to treat her with respect.

  EMILIA CLARKE: I was so desperate to be the most professional actor I could be that I’d be like, “Yeah, sure,” for anything they threw at me. “I’ll just cry about it in the bathroom later, whatever, you won’t know.”

  Clarke also pointed out that the show’s male actors weren’t publicly scrutinized for their nude scenes nearly as much as she was.

  EMILIA CLARKE: How many times has Michiel Huisman [who played Daario Naharis] been asked about the fact he’s taken his clothes off a bunch? Is that even a discussion?

  It’s true male actors were also encouraged to strip, as Jason Momoa, Eugene Michael Simon, and Kristian Nairn can attest.

  DAVID BENIOFF: The first sex scene we ever shot [was a reshoot pickup] between Khal Drogo and Emilia where she gets on top of him and takes charge. It’s the nice, romantic scene. We were nervous because we had never directed anything for real before. It seemed like it went fine, and then afterward Jason walks up to me and goes, “Hey, you did a great job.” He shakes my hand, and I look down and he put the . . .

  DAN WEISS: It’s called a “cock sock.”

  DAVID BENIOFF: It’s basically like a condom except a little bigger. He put it in my hand, and it had been on his cock the entire scene.

  JASON MOMOA: That was because David had been like, “Momoa, just take it off!” You know, giving me shit. “Sacrifice! Do it for your art!” I’m just like, “Fuck you, bro. My wife would be pissed. That’s for one lady only, man.” David and I love giving each other shit.

  So afterward I ripped the thing off and kept it in my hand and gave him a big hug and a handshake and was like, “Hey, now you have a little bit of me on you, buddy.”

  And then there was the time Hodor unexpectedly ran naked into a scene.

  KRISTIAN NAIRN (Hodor): David and Dan asked if I would do a nude scene. First I asked if there’s a child in the scene, which there was, so I asked if I could wear a prosthetic and they said yes. I was shit scared, but I did it because of the whole body-positive thing—Game of Thrones has a lot of people of different shapes and sizes, probably more than any other show ever. It was a very busy day on set, which was the opposite of what they told me. I’ve never seen a busier set! I had to get the prosthetic planted and weaved into my own body hair. It was liberating and mortifying. There was a lot of laughter on set that day.

  DAVID BENIOFF: Equal-opportunity nudity. There’s a line in the book about Hodor having the blood of giants, and you need to see him for that line to play. And we didn’t want to do the coy Austin Powers joke where he’s covered up by a French baguette or something.

  The Thrones team will have more to say about the show’s sexual content later in these pages. But for Daenerys, the Targaryen princess became pregnant with Drogo’s child, while her loathsome brother Viserys felt increasingly frustrated and marginalized. One night Viserys became drunk and threatened Daenerys, so the khal poured a cauldron of boiling liquid gold over his head. It was a decisive moment for Daenerys as she finally stood up to her tyrannical older brother, but it was also the first glimpse of a dark and steely resolve within the character: “He was no dragon,” Daenerys intoned as she stared impassively at her dying brother. “Fire cannot kill a dragon. . . .”

  EMILIA CLARKE: You want me to what?! Okay, so this is the ultimate power play. Right. I need to hide between some cars and sit with this for a second and figure out what this is. So my loyalty is now to my husband. But Viserys is my brother. He’s my blood, he’s my family. Can I wrap my young brain around the dichotomy of a family member manipulating her? What’s it like to be a kid that’s been abused her whole life? How on earth can you have the wherewithal to rise above the only thing you’ve ever known? To take a breath of fresh air and go, “Whoa, my life is built on a lie.” This was an education as to what Daenerys might end up feeling later on.

  PETER DINKLAGE (Tyrion Lannister): What Emilia did there was so impressive because it wasn’t mean. It was like, “You are so gone to me.” If it was mean, it wouldn’t have been as effective. He was gone to her, and she had this new person in her life that for some weird, crazy reason she was starting to fall in love with. That’s what’s so cool about this show. Relationships
can start horribly and grow into love, or vice versa. Emilia’s amazing because that’s very tricky to do, because you could [act like], “Fuck you, brother, you deserve it,” or go, “He doesn’t deserve that,” but it was neither. It was this in-between place that was so terrifying. Her transformation in season one was just incredible.

  EMILIA CLARKE: It was a moment where shouting doesn’t work. Anger doesn’t work. Anger moves mountains, but in a woman it’s perceived to be irrational and hysterical, over-the-top, and you white-noise it out. So the only thing to do is become the most powerful person in the room. And the most powerful person in the room is always the stillest. That was where Daenerys’s steeliness came from. I remember being like, “This is harder, but this feels good.” Because [Khal Drogo] can’t not look at me. He can’t tear his gaze away from the fact that I am fully able to watch a family member die in front of me and not even blink.

  The scene proved a technical challenge as well, since Viserys’s death was largely created using practical effects instead of CGI. Actor Harry Lloyd was outfitted with hidden pipes that pushed bubbling steam through tiny holes in his wig.

  DANIEL MINAHAN (director): It wasn’t easy to figure out how to pour molten gold over someone’s head. And it was a very expensive wig. We were only going to be [able to] do one take of it.

  HARRY LLOYD (Viserys Targaryen): I was really worried about the drunkenness looking ridiculous. The night before I was watching YouTube videos of drunks, and I wandered down the hotel corridor trying to stumble right. When it came time to shoot I was outside the tent in the freezing cold in Belfast with a hot toddy—tea and honey—and I had a little whiskey from the hotel and put some in there. The vulnerability in the scene came naturally, because it was fucking scary.

  DANIEL MINAHAN: What surprised me was how nervous Jason Momoa was, because he was so unflappable and fearless. Before we shot, Jason caught my eye and held up his hand—it was trembling.

  JASON MOMOA: I was really nervous. I didn’t want to mess it up.

  DANIEL MINAHAN: Drogo’s gold jewelry was made of wax. We threw it in the cauldron, and it began to melt. Then we switched out the cauldron with this bubbling viscous fluid. Then Jason said to Harry, “Are you ready? I’m going to do it.”

  JASON MOMOA: There are moments in acting where you’re really free and out of your head and you’re really into a character. You don’t have any anxiety about anything and you’re listening and feeling and kind of in a zone. That moment was 100 percent that. I remember reaching out and holding Emilia’s belly and having my back to Harry, then saying a word where [the Dothraki] grab him and I’m just trying to be cool and calm and collected. Drogo’s no-nonsense. He’s done this a thousand times.

  HARRY LLOYD: I remember talking to a doctor about it beforehand. He said Viserys is dying from the gold piercing his brain and it would be like a single scream. Then on the day of shooting I was told to scream and make it a bit more demented. It felt like a fucking rush.

  JASON MOMOA: As I’m pouring it over his head I got very excited. I just started watching him. I think Drogo would enjoy watching people’s expressions—like watching him scream with the gold going over his mouth. Then I started to smell him because of the smoke coming up. It was so fucked up. I remember walking away from that going, “There’s some ancestral shit going on in that one.” Because I just really enjoyed myself.

  DANIEL MINAHAN: And it all worked in one take.

  One unusual moment when filming the Daenerys-Drogo storyline was the khal’s gory fight with a Dothraki rider named Mago. Not only was the fight not in Martin’s book, it wasn’t even in the script.

  JASON MOMOA: I told David and Dan one thing missing in the book for me was to see Drogo fight. The whole buildup and the myth of him is amazing, and George is phenomenal. But I want to see him fuck shit up. That’s why I did the haka in the audition, so you could just see what it would be like if he went into battle. I said, “I can make this simple. I can just bob and weave and then we see his quickness.”

  DAVID BENIOFF: Jason had a high batting average of ideas he’d come to us [with] that we liked and ended up using. And one thing he said fairly early on was, “I’m supposed to be the baddest man on the planet, I got this long braid because I’ve never lost a fight, and everybody is afraid of me. But nobody sees me fight, and isn’t that kind of lame?” We told him, “No, it’s good, you’re so badass you don’t have to prove yourself. You’re the victor of a thousand battles, Jason, go back to your trailer.” But there was something kind of strange with not getting to see this guy do what he does best.

  Despite the first season’s limited budget and constant time pressure, a fight scene was conceived on the fly. The initial setup was that Mago would insult Daenerys, the two men would fight, and Drogo would chop off Mago’s head.

  JASON MOMOA: Then I had a dream where somebody dumped on my wife and I ripped his tongue out through his throat.

  DANIEL MINAHAN: Jason said, “I don’t think I should chop his head off; we’ve chopped off so many people’s heads. I think I should cut his throat open and pull his tongue out through his throat.” I’m like, “Okay, let me get a tongue made.”

  JASON MOMOA: The guy I’m fighting [Ivailo Dimitrov] was Bulgarian. He was my double for horse riding. We didn’t have anyone else because it was so last-minute. But he didn’t speak English and needs to give a speech in Dothraki. The producers were like, “You fucking hired him, you teach him!” So I had to teach a Bulgarian how to speak Dothraki when he doesn’t speak English. And he did great. I still have that tongue on my desk.

  A scratch from the fight would result in Drogo’s demise (originally, Drogo was going to get the wound during an off-screen raid). Daenerys convinced her husband to let an enslaved sorceress treat him, which led to an infection and his death. It’s a quintessential Martin twist—an undefeated warrior brought down by a slight miscalculation, his fate sealed by allowing his sentiment to override his caution.

  JASON MOMOA: It’s amazing what George sets up. Here are your lead characters, you’re supposed to think about them one way, and you hate them, then you love them, and then they’re killed, and it’s a whirlwind of emotion. And all the little kids and even the smallest of characters just grow and grow and grow. He built a beautiful world. To play Khal Drogo was phenomenal, and I wished there was more stuff he could have done.

  Khal Drogo was a career-making performance for Momoa, though for a while Thrones was a hindrance. The actor was so utterly convincing as a Dothraki warrior that he struggled for parts after the first season aired. Hollywood producers were convinced the Hawaiian-born actor either couldn’t read dialogue or could only play strong, silent warrior types. As the years passed, Drogo became a fan favorite, and Momoa shot to stardom in films like Aquaman.

  JASON MOMOA: For a while afterward, a lot of people bagged on me. It hurt me a lot. People thought I didn’t speak English. They didn’t know I was playing a role. I’m nothing like Drogo. I’m like Drogo when I’m being lovey and close to the woman I love and being nice, but his other half is not me. But then everyone fell in love with Drogo when they rewatched the show. It’s been ten years since I was on, and it’s still a frenzy. Now people come up all the time going crazy about Drogo.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Learning to Die

  Ned Stark’s execution was the traumatic loss of Game of Thrones’ most traditional heroic protagonist. He was the steely and honorable patriarch chosen for a position of newfound power who uncovered a conspiracy against his longtime friend King Robert Baratheon. Up until that moment, every storytelling convention signaled to viewers that Ned would be the show’s focus. Thrones’ debut poster showed Ned on the Iron Throne, an assurance he was the lead character, one who was perhaps destined to rule Westeros. George R. R. Martin even told viewers in a pre-season publicity video that “Ned Stark is the center of the series.”

  Between HBO’s crafty marketing and the ultra-cautious nature of most TV story
telling, Ned’s death was arguably more shocking and groundbreaking in the series than it was in Martin’s books. Thousands of TV shows had aired over the previous six decades, yet never before had a major series launched with an obvious lead character and then deliberately gotten rid of them in a debut season for strictly creative reasons.

  Or, to use the Boromir meme, “One does not simply . . .” kill off your series lead in the ninth episode.

  ALAN TAYLOR (director): [“Baelor”] was my first episode, and I knew it was a big deal we were doing this. Many people, especially those who did not know the books, would assume they’d be following Ned Stark’s story for the next several seasons. We knew we were doing something radical in television terms.

  GEORGE R. R. MARTIN (author, co–executive producer): The impact of Gandalf’s death was enormous on me when I was a twelve-year-old kid reading The Fellowship of the Ring—“Fly, you fools!” and he goes into the chasm. “Holy shit, [J. R. R. Tolkien] killed the wizard! That’s the guy who knew everything! How are they going to [destroy the ring of power] without him?” And now the “kids” have to grow up because “Daddy” is dead. If Gandalf could die, anybody could die. Then, just a few chapters later, Boromir goes down.

  Those two deaths created in me the “anyone could die” thing. At that point I was expecting him to pick off the whole Fellowship one by one. But then, of course, he brings Gandalf back. He’s a little strange at first, but then he’s basically the same old Gandalf. I liked the impact we got from his being gone.