By all accounts, the sets of Game of Thrones seem like mighty fun and interesting places
to be, mainly because dragons and White Walkers aren't real, and swords and armor are pretty
cool.
Still, some of the shenanigans and troubles on set are almost equal to the trials and
tribulations of Westeros.
Here's a look at some of the bizarre things that happened on the set of Game of Thrones.
They destroyed a natural wonder
Malta was chosen for one of the shooting locations during the first season.
But during the filming of the Dothraki wedding scene, at the Dwejra Heritage Park, relations
soured between the showrunners and Malta's government.
When the production crew poured sand on protected fossil-rich rock beds without any protective
membrane, the sand seeped into the land and cemented, burying local flora and fauna, and
causing what an independent inquiry called "damage to irreplaceable fossil and ichnofossil features".
A local production company was fined €36,500 for the damage, and the series left Malta
soon thereafter.
According to some sources, the Maltese government banned the show from continuing to film in
the country.
However, some Maltese blame the debacle on the lack of oversight from the Malta Environmental
and Planning Authority, and have even called for the authority's bureaucrats to be beheaded
and have their heads displayed on pikes, to entice HBO to return.
Way to get into character, Malta!
Skinning real stags
In case you haven't noticed, Game of Thrones is big into symbolism, so considering the
fate of the Baratheon family, whose house symbol is a stag, it's no wonder the show
wound up using a lot of dead deer.
For instance, the dead stag the Starks find in the pilot episode?
That was a real stag that had been shot and butchered a couple days before the scene was
filmed.
By the time they were ready to film, the corpse was quite ripe, and the actors struggled to
keep from vomiting throughout the takes.
Later in the series, Tywin Lannister was introduced in a scene where he was skinning a stag.
Actor Charles Dance had one day to learn how to skin it.
He told The Daily Beast, "This butcher arrived with a dead animal and they gave me a little
room to work in, gave me a sharp knife, and showed me how to skin it and spill the guts
into a bucket.
The next day, they gave me another dead animal, and we shot it.
It was a bloody good time, but it took me two days to get the smell off my hands."
Ad-libbing in Dothraki
When creating the made up language Dothraki for the series, the showrunners turn to creative
linguist David J. Peterson.
That's great for making your language as realistic as possible, but sometimes he's just not around
— so the actors may make up stuff off the top of their heads.
And then Peterson has to retroactively make it fit.
In one of the early scenes portraying the Dothraki, Jason Momoa's Khal Drogo watched
two horny Dothraki braves fight to the death.
Producers told him to ad-lib a line, so Momoa used a refrain from the Maori haka war dance.
"I te waka."
Peterson liked the sound of the line so much, he ended up adding it into the Dothraki language
as "Test your mettle!"
Not bad, but the improvisational dictionary didn't stop there.
Iain Glen got into the action as well, when the producers forced him to ad-lib a Dothraki
line at the last minute.
The producers realized they needed his character, Jorah Mormont, to holler "Take all the gold
and jewels!" in Dothraki so they could put that up on-screen as a subtitle.
Glen just made up some nonsense sounds that went a little something like this...
Fortunately, Peterson — being the pro linguist that he is — later managed to translate
that buncha gobbledygook into "The loose valuables are for loading."
That's some awkward phrasing, but it almost makes sense considering Jorah speaks Dothraki
as a second language.
Hurricane Katia vs. the Knights of Summer
Scenes of Renly's camp in Season 2 were meant to be sunny and upbeat, a reflection of the
ethos of the "knights of summer" who see war as a game.
Problem was, Hurricane Katia struck in the middle of filming, leading to some unscripted
— and scary — moments.
According to Finn Jones, who played Loras Tyrell, "Literally the whole extras tent,
which was about 1,000 extras and all their costumes, took off into the air!
It was actually terrifying with things swinging down and people getting knocked out.
It was absolute chaos.
So that was a real disaster but luckily everyone was OK in the end."
Well, not quite everyone — five extras were taken to the hospital for treatment.
And that's not even counting the smoke baby.
Perverted executives
Game of Thrones has often been criticized for "sexposition," where dry, dialogue-heavy
scenes get livened up with casual nudity.
Saturday Night Live even did a sketch contending the footage must have been added by a 13 year old boy.
But according to director Neil Marshall, that joke wasn't so far from the truth.
In an interview with the Empire podcast, Marshall described one of the executive producers pushing
him to go full frontal as often as possible just for kicks.
“This particular exec like took me to one side and said, ‘Look, I represent the pervert
side of the audience, okay?
And I’m saying I want full-frontal nudity in this scene.’”
Adam Friedberg approves.
Seriously — naked people everywhere
So, yeah, there's a lot of nudity on the show.
But there's even more on the set, where actors often end up lounging around in the buff between scenes.
Actor Pedro Pascal, who played Oberyn Martell, revealed that one actress stayed naked between
takes of an orgy sequence and passed the time playing Words with Friends with show creator
David Benioff — while Charles Dance struggled to stay focused on his newspaper.
“And Charles has the paper, and she’s trying to talk with him and he’s like…”
“Hahaha.”
“And he looks up at me and he’s like…”
That seems to be just par for the course according to Jaime Lannister actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau,
who told GQ, "I've seen Sean Bean naked.
I've seen Mark Addy.
And Lena … We do that at the read-through.
We just strip naked and read the script."
Adam Friedberg approves.
Horse heart
Ever wonder what a horse heart tastes like?
Well, one thing it apparently does not taste like is Gummi Bears.
Emilia Clarke discovered this the hard way when she had to eat a fake horse heart, which
she was assured would taste like the colorful candy.
It didn't.
Instead, she told Vulture it was "...sort of a congealed jam kind of thing.
On the outtakes, there will be me heaving into a bucket.
It's such a reflex, when you taste something that's just so revolting, you kind of instantly
just want to get rid of it.
It's safe to say that I didn't eat lunch that day."
To make things worse, she ended up getting covered from head to toe in sticky fake blood,
and disappeared from the set for a while because she accidentally got stuck to her toilet seat.
Adam Friedberg approves.
Ew.
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