16 Stark Family Facts Even Game of Thornes' Biggest Fans Don't Know
Game of Thrones: How They Make the World'due south Most Popular Show
Past Daniel D'Addario/Belfast | Photographs by Miles Aldridge for Time
The battle for Westeros may exist won or lost on the back of a lime green mechanical bull.
That's what it looks like on a Jan Monday in Belfast, every bit Game of Thrones films its seventh flavor hither. Certainly no one believes the dragons that accept thrilled viewers of HBO'south hit series exist in whatever real sense. And yet information technology's still somewhat surprising to run into the British actor Emilia Clarke, who plays exiled queen Daenerys, straddling the "buck" on a soundstage at Titanic Studios, a motion-picture show circuitous named afterward this city's other famously massive consign.
The car under Clarke looks similar a big pommel horse and moves in sync with a computer blitheness of what will become a dragon. Clarke doesn't talk much betwixt takes. Over and over, a wind gun blasts her with merely plenty strength to make me worry about the integrity of her ash blond wig. (Its detail color is the result of 2½ months' worth of testing and seven prototypes, according to the show's hair designer.) Over and over, Clarke stares downward at a masking-tape mark on the floor the instant episode director Alan Taylor shouts, "Now!" Nearby, several visual-effects supervisors sentinel on monitors.
Clarke and I talk in her trailer earlier she heads to the soundstage, at the beginning of what is to be a long week inhabiting a now iconic character. Behind the scenes information technology'southward more toil than triumph, though. The show'due south first season concluded with Daenerys' hatching 3 babe dragons, each the size of a Pomeranian. They've since grown to the size of a 747. "I'm 5-ft.-nothing, I'm a little girl," she says. "They're like, 'Emilia, climb those stairs, get on that huge thing, we'll harness you in, and then yous'll go crazy.' And yous're like, 'Hey, everybody! At present who's shorty?!'"
She has reason to experience powerful. On July 16, Clarke and the residuum of the cast will begin bringing Thrones in for a landing with the first of its final 13 episodes (seven to air this summer, 6 to come later on). Thrones, a scrappy upstart launched by two Goggle box novices in 2011, will finish its run equally the biggest and most popular show in the world. An average of more than 23 1000000 Americans watched each episode last season when platforms like streaming and video on demand are deemed for. And since information technology's the most pirated show e'er, millions more watch it in ways unaccounted for. Thrones, which holds the record for most Emmys ever won by a prime-time series, airs in more than 170 countries. It'southward the farthest-reaching show out there—not to mention the near obsessed-nearly.
emilia clarke | daenerys targaryen
People talk about living in a gilded age of Boob tube ushered in past hit dramas like The Sopranos, Mad Men and Breaking Bad. All had precisely honed insights about the nature of humanity and of evil that remade expectations of what TV could do. But that catamenia concluded around the time Breaking Bad went off the air in 2013. We're in what came side by side: an unprecedented glut of programming, with streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu jumping into an ever-more than-crowded fray. At present, there's a prestige show for every believable viewer, which means smaller audiences and fewer truly original stories.
Except for Thrones, which merges the psychological complexity of the all-time Television with erstwhile-schoolhouse Hollywood grandeur. You lot liked shows with i antihero? Well, Thrones has five Tony Sopranos edifice their empires on blood, five Walter Whites discovering only how far they'll go to win, five Don Drapers unapologetic in their narcissism. Oh, and they're all living out their drama confronting the nigh breathtaking vistas not of this world.
kit harington | jon snow
The phenomenon is fueled by a massive worldwide appliance that, in a typical x-episode season, generates the equivalent of five large-budget, feature-length movies. Fifty-fifty every bit the serial has grown in every conceivable way over the years—it shoots around the earth; each episode now boasts a upkeep of at least $10 one thousand thousand—it remains animated past one simple question: Who volition win the game in the stop? And if Thrones has taught u.s. anything, information technology'southward that every reign has to end sometime.
1. the fiction
It all started with a volume. In 1996, George R.R. Martin published A Game of Thrones, the outset novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. (Back then, he conceived of it as a trilogy. Today, v of the planned seven volumes have been published.) Every bit a writer for shows like CBS's The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Animate being in the late '80s, Martin had been frustrated by the limits of TV. He decided that turning to prose meant writing something "equally big equally my imagination." Martin recalls telling himself, "I'm going to have all the characters I desire, and gigantic castles, and dragons, and dire wolves, and hundreds of years of history, and a actually complex plot. And it's fine because information technology'south a volume. Information technology'due south essentially unfilmable."
The books became a hit, especially afterward 1999's A Clash of Kings and A Tempest of Swords a yr afterwards. Martin, who writes from his home in Santa Fe, N.K., was compared to The Lord of the Rings writer J.R.R. Tolkien. Like Tolkien'southward Middle-earth, Martin's Westeros is a state with a distinctive set up of rules. First, magic is real. 2d, winter is coming. Seasons can concluding for years at a fourth dimension, and equally the series begins, a long summer is ending. Tertiary, no one is rubber. New religions are in conflict with the old, rival houses have designs on the capital's Iron Throne, and an undead army is pushing against the boundary of civilization, known as the Wall.
Thrones' vast number of clans includes the wealthy and louche Lannisters, including incestuous twins Cersei and Jaime. She is the queen past union; he helped ensure her ascendancy through violence. Their brother Tyrion, an "imp" of short stature, is perhaps the most acute student of power. Then there are the Starks, led by duty-bound Ned. His children Robb, Sansa, Arya, Bran, Rickon and "bastard" Jon Snow will be scattered throughout the realm's Vii Kingdoms. Daenerys is a Targaryen, an overthrown family that also—surprise—has a claim to the throne. Presently plenty, Thrones devolves into an all-out melee that makes the Wars of the Roses look like Family Feud.
lena headey | cersei lannister
In the wake of director Peter Jackson's early-2000s film trilogy of Tolkien'southward masterpiece, Martin was courted by producers to turn his books into "the adjacent Lord of the Rings franchise." But the Thrones story was too big, and would-be collaborators suggested cut it to focus solely on Daenerys or Snow, for case. Martin turned them all downwards. His story's expansiveness was the bespeak.
Two middleweight novelists, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, had come up to a similar conclusion and obtained Martin's blessing at what the author calls "that famous lunch that turned into a dinner, considering nosotros were there for iv or v hours" in 2006. The two writers thought Thrones could merely be made as a premium-cablevision drama, and they walked into HBO'south office with an ambitious pitch to practise so that year. "They were talking about this series of books I'd never heard of," says Carolyn Strauss, head of HBO's entertainment division at the time. "[I was] somebody who looked around the theater in Lord of the Rings, at all of those rapt faces, and I am just not on this particular ferry … I thought, This sounds interesting. Who knows? It could be a large evidence."
HBO bought the idea and handed the reins to Benioff and Weiss, making them showrunners who'd never run a show before. Benioff was best known for having adapted his novel The 25th Hour into a screenplay directed past Spike Lee. Weiss had a novel to his credit likewise. The ii had met in a literature programme in Dublin in 1995 and afterward reconnected in u.s.. "I decided I wanted to write a screenplay," Benioff told Vanity Fair in 2014. "I'd never written a script earlier, and I didn't know how to practise information technology, then I asked [Weiss] if he would write one with me, because he had written a agglomeration already." It never got made.
The Thrones pilot, shot in 2009, got off to a rocky start. Benioff and Weiss misjudged how much planning it would accept to bring Martin's fantasy to life. To portray a White Walker—mystic creatures from the N—they but stuck an role player in a green-screen getup and hoped to figure information technology out later. "Yous tin can maybe do that if you're making Avatar," says Weiss. "But we need to know what the creatures look like before we turn on the photographic camera." They also had trouble portraying Martin's nuanced characters. "Our friends—really smart, savvy writers—didn't [realize] Jaime and Cersei were blood brother and sister," says Benioff of the sick-fated showtime cutting. Ultimately, they reshot the airplane pilot.
nikolaj coster-waldau | jaime lannister
When Benioff and Weiss look back at that beginning season, they come across plenty to nitpick. Their fealty to Martin's text, for example, made Peter Dinklage's Tyrion "Eminem blond," per Benioff. (His hair was later darkened.) Still, the elements that have made the show a monster success were there—and audiences (3 million for Thrones' offset season finale) picked upwardly on them. Arguably the most groundbreaking element was a willingness to ruthlessly murder its stars. Ned Stark, the moral center of Season 1, portrayed by the show's then most famous cast member (Sean Bean, who starred in The Lord of the Rings), is shockingly beheaded in the second-to-last episode. By the 3rd flavour'south "Cerise Wedding," a far more gruesome alternative, the show had accrued plenty fans to send the Internet into full on freak-out mode.
Thrones had by and then become the pacesetter for all of TV in its willingness to forgo a simple happy ending in favor of delivering pleasance through brutality. Fifty-fifty if you don't spotter, Thrones' characters and catchphrases have permeated the civilization (the apparent death of Snow was an international trending topic all summer in 2015). Saturday Nighttime Live, The Simpsons and The Tonight Show have lampooned the show. And the contempo South Korean presidential election was chosen on a national news network with depictions of the candidates duking it out for control of the Fe Throne.
two. the production
Wandering around the Belfast fix, the scope and the orderliness of the enterprise is staggering. The wights, zombie-like creatures with spookily stake faces and dressed in ragged furs, course a tidy line as they wait to grab breakfast burritos. Outside the stage door, a few fume cigarettes, careful not to ash on their worn-in tunics. "At kickoff we had a season with one big result, and so we had a season with ii big events, now we have a season where every episode is a big event," says Joe Bauer, the show'south VFX supervisor. Bauer and VFX producer Steve Kullback oversee a group of xiv FX shops from New Zealand to Germany that work on the show nigh continuously.
One of those large events this season is a boxing whose sheer scope, even before being cut together with the show's typical brio, dazzled me. In order to get on set, I agreed non to divulge the players or what's at stake. (Thrones has been promising this clash all forth, and when the fourth dimension comes, the Internet will cook.) Information technology will be all the more impressive knowing that the cast and crew were shot through with a frigid North Atlantic wind that whipped everyone during filming and sent them all flying to the coffee cart during resets. (The common cold, a prosthetic artist tells me, is at to the lowest degree good for keeping the makeup on.)
peter dınklage | tyrion lannister
The setting is every bit grand as the activeness. The battle was filmed in what was once a Belfast quarry, tuckered, flattened out with 11,000 square meters of concrete and painted over with a camouflage consequence—all of which took six months and required special ecological surveys. This kind of mountain moving, or leveling, is par for the course for Thrones.
Each flavour starts with producers Christopher Newman and Bernadette Caulfield circulating a plot outline on a color-coded spreadsheet, dictating what volition exist shot by the show's ii simultaneous camera units, which tin can splinter into as many as iv. It's perpetually subject to change, given the complications of a television show this ambitious—over seven seasons they've shot in Croatia, Spain, Republic of iceland, Republic of malta, Morocco and Canada as well as locations around Northern Ireland. While I'm in Belfast, my programme to watch Jon Snow in activity is canceled because of inclement weather (that aforementioned wind) that makes filming from a drone chancy. At this point, Caulfield volition grab onto any small comfort. "Now the dragon doesn't go whatsoever bigger," she says, "so we know that much."
Another breakdown goes out to department heads, and a massive global triage begins. Costumer Michele Clapton, for example, begins figuring out if she'll have to dress any new characters or armies so sets out on the most complex work. "I know that Daenerys' dresses will take the longest," she says. Each expect, no matter the character, may have as many as four craftspeople to bead, run up and—if in that location's meant to exist wearable and tear—interruption down. Deborah Riley, the production designer, begins looking for references to new locations in the outline. Tommy Dunne, the weapons master, starts forging gear for the season's big battles. "My big thing is the numbers," he says. "I hope they won't frighten me." He fabricated 200 shields and 250 spears for last flavor's ballsy Battle of the Bastards.
sophie turner | sansa stark
Benioff's and Weiss's jobs amount to maintaining constant chat with numerous producers. The pair are ordinarily in Belfast for about six months a year. Wherever in the world they happen to be, they get daily video from the shoots and field an endless stream of emails from staff on location. During my visit, wolves described in the script as "skinny and mangy" showed up to the shoot looking fluffy and lustrous. Around the world, new message notifications lit up smartphone screens.
When Benioff and Weiss aren't shooting, they're writing. And when they aren't shooting or writing—which happens rarely—they're promoting. The two make a complementary pair. Benioff, who wears his pilus in a Morrissey quiff, is the more sardonic one. Weiss, with silver rings in his ears, is nerdier and given to hyperbole. They say they're nonetheless having fun making Thrones, despite the stakes, and all the same regularly find themselves surprised by its scale. Weiss recalls seeing the buck Clarke rides to simulate Daenerys' dragons for the offset time: "We knew it would exist a mechanical bull. We didn't know it would be 40 ft. in the air and six degrees of motion with cameras that swirl." Says Benioff: "Information technology'southward like the thing NASA built to train the astronauts."
Despite nonstop production, Weiss says, "There's still a kid-in-a-candy-shop experience. You're going to wait at the armor, crazy-astonishing dresses—gowns Michele is making—then y'all're going to wait at the swords, then sentry pre-vis cartoons of the scenes that volition be shot and yous're weighing in on shot selection. Every one of these things is something we've been fascinated with in our own style since we were kids."
"Especially dresses," cracks Benioff. Weiss adds, "Peculiarly the gowns."
3. the players
The beginning few seasons' worth of swordplay and gowns turned the show's cast into recognizable stars. But information technology's the complexity of their characters, revealed over fourth dimension, that made them into icons. "My friends always say to me, 'It's like you're 2 different people. I see manufactures almost you in BuzzFeed'—just then they see my Facebook posts," says Maisie Williams, who plays the tomboy turned angel of vengeance Arya Stark. Williams was two days by her 14th altogether when the show debuted. At that place's TV-star famous, after all, and then there's some-percentage-of-23-million-people-has-been-actively-rooting-for-you-to-kill-off-your-co-stars-for-6-years famous.
Thrones' story doesn't ask its actors to intermission bad or skilful, and viewers stay tuned in large role because of the characters' moral mutability. Consider Cersei, played by Lena Headey, who is either a monster or a victim. The character has become more popular with fans even as she'southward wrought greater carnage, including bravado upwards a edifice full of people last flavour. "At the beginning, people were similar, 'Oh my God, yous're such a bitch!'" she says. "What's moving is that people love her now and want to be on her team." That Headey, a Brit, uses an exaggerated American accent every bit she delivers the harsher interpretation of her work is revealing of nothing, or a lot.
She'southward thought through every chemical element of her grapheme, though, including the incestuous human relationship with Jaime that provided the prove its first narrative jolt. "I dearest to talk most all of information technology," she says, citing her frequent emails to Benioff and Weiss. "Cersei's always wanted to exist him. Therefore, for her, that relationship is completion. There's been an green-eyed, because he was born with privilege just for being a human being. I recollect their love was built on respect."
maisie williams | arya stark
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish actor who plays Jaime, is a bit less excited to discuss the subject. "I've never really gone also deep into the whole sister-brother thing considering I can't use that data. I take to expect at her as the woman he loves and desires. Lena'due south a very good actress, and that'southward kind of what carries the whole thing." He adds, "I take two older sisters. I exercise non want to go at that place. It's just likewise weird."
Even a graphic symbol like Jon Snowfall, equally close to a pure hero equally possible as Season 7 begins, has outgrown the box he originally came in. Snow, an illegitimate child never embraced by his father'south wife, is a James Dean fantasize of Sir Walter Scott. "I made mistakes and felt that he wasn't interesting enough," says Kit Harington of the fashion he'southward played Snow. We're in a Belfast hotel bar, and Harington is squeezing in a coffee earlier he makes an evening showing of Manchester by the Sea. "That sounds weird, only I've never been quite content with him. Maybe that's what makes him him. That angst." His grapheme has been slowly arresting lessons virtually duty and power—and "this twelvemonth there is this huge seismic shift where all of what he's learned over the years, of a sudden …" Harington trails off. "He'south still the same Jon, just he grows up."
Dinklage, as well, constitute in Tyrion a character who surpassed his expectations. The actor says he'd never read fantasy across The Lord of the Rings. "That's the function of the bookstore I don't really gravitate toward," he says. "This was the first fourth dimension in this genre that somebody my size was an really multidimensional being, flesh and blood without the really long beard, without the pointy shoes, without the asexuality."
Thrones catapulted Dinklage, the only American in the main cast, from a well-regarded film and theater actor to among the most-recognized actors on earth in part because the asexuality is quite absent. Tyrion thirsts for vino, sex and, crucially, beloved and respect. As the offspring of a wealthy and powerful family, the first two are like shooting fish in a barrel to come past. The latter not so much. "He covers information technology up with alcohol, he covers information technology up with humour, he does his best to maintain a modicum of sanity and he perseveres," says Dinklage. "He'due south nevertheless alive. Anyone who's however alive on our evidence is pretty smart."
Indeed, with just 13 episodes left, everything is possible—alliance, demise or coronation. "Every season I become to the last folio of the last episode and get backward," says Dinklage. "I don't exercise that with books, but I can't crack open page ane of Episode 1 not knowing if I'one thousand dead or not."
4. the drama
The size of Thrones' controversies accept, at times, been as large equally its post-obit. Its reliance on female person nudity, especially Daenerys', was an early on wink point. "I don't have any qualms maxim to anyone it was not the virtually enjoyable experience. How could it be?" says Clarke. "I don't know how many actresses relish doing that part of information technology." That attribute of the role has faded every bit Daenerys institute paths to power beyond her sexuality. This development from a passive naïf into a holy terror who rules past the fealty of her subjects is what has earned Daenerys, co-ordinate to Clarke, the audition's loyalty. "People wouldn't give two sh-ts about Daenerys if you lot didn't run across her suffer," she says.
More controversial still has been the prevalence of sexual violence. Many of the major female characters have been assaulted onscreen. In a 2015 sequence, Sansa, the Stark daughter played by Sophie Turner, was raped past her husband. According to the logic of the show, the plot gave her character a reason to seek revenge and ability of her own. It nonetheless generated substantial blowback online and conspicuously turned some fans abroad from the series for good. "This was the trending topic on Twitter, and it makes you wonder, when it happens in real life, why isn't it a trending topic every time?" says Turner, who is 21. "This was a fictional grapheme, and I got to walk away from it unscathed … Allow's take that discussion and that dialogue and use it to help people who are going through that in their everyday lives. Stop making information technology such a taboo, and go far a give-and-take."
Benioff and Weiss claim to have seen no other possible effect for a character stranded in a marriage to a psychopath, in a skewed version of feudal society. "It might not be our earth," says Benioff, "but it'due south still the same bones power dynamic between men and women in this medieval globe. This is what we believed was going to happen." Adds Weiss: "We talked well-nigh, is at that place whatsoever other manner she could mayhap avoid this fate that doesn't seem faux, where she uses her pluck to relieve herself at the last? At that place was no version of that that didn't seem completely horrible."
Even if Benioff and Weiss don't e'er admit it, the show has changed. Scenes in which exposition is delivered in i brothel or another, for case, accept been pared back. It'south at moments like these that the success of Thrones seems a precariously struck balance, thriving on a willingness to stupor but always risking going besides far.
five. the end of the end
Benioff and Weiss merits to take sworn off reading commentary about the testify, skillful or bad. When I visit them in Los Angeles in March, they're writing the next and final flavor. I peek into a fridge in a lounge area in their offices, a room dominated by a Thrones-branded pinball auto Weiss proudly points out, to find iii cases of beer with Westeros-themed labels, low-calorie ranch dressing and yellow mustard. At this point, they take full outlines of the concluding half dozen episodes. In fact, they've been working on the very last episode, possibly the most predictable finale since Hawkeye left Korea. "Nosotros know what happens in each scene," says Weiss.
The fact that they know is remarkable considering the evidence will achieve its conclusion long before the books. The last new Thrones novel came out in 2011, the year the show began. The author describes his next installment, the sixth of vii, every bit "massively late." "The journey is an run a risk," says Martin, who, at 68, has fought criticism that he won't finish the books. "There'due south always that procedure of discovery for me." But with young, and rapidly maturing, actors under contract and a community of artisans pending marching orders in Belfast, the bear witness tin't look.
Benioff and Weiss always knew this would happen. So they met with the novelist in 2013, between Seasons 2 and three, to sketch out what Martin calls "the ultimate developments" after the books and show diverge. The upshot, they say, is that the two tin coexist. "Certain things that we learned from George manner back and then are going to happen on the show, but certain things won't," says Benioff. "And there'southward certain things where George didn't know what was going to happen, and so we're going to detect them out for the first time too."
d.b. weiss and david benioff | prove-runners
In preparation for Season seven, Benioff and Weiss have gotten more possessive. That has further fueled fans' marvel fifty-fifty as it has created security challenges. In the run-upwardly to Season 6, paparazzi shots of Harington—and his distinctive in-character hairdo—in Belfast tipped the Net off that Jon Snow wasn't, in fact, equally dead as he'd seemed the season earlier. "Look at how hard it is to protect information in this age," says Benioff. "The CIA tin't do it. The NSA can't do it. What chance practise we have?"
Information technology'due south likewise changed the on-set up dynamic. Coster-Waldau says Benioff and Weiss have "become much more than protective over the story and script. I think they feel this is truly theirs now, and information technology's not to be tampered with. I've merely sensed this terminal flavour that this is their babe: 'Just say the words every bit they're written, and shut up.'"
And so at that place'due south the finish of the cease, the finale likely to air side by side year or the yr after. Benioff and Weiss are non writing the Thrones spin-off projects HBO revealed this year that could explore other parts of Westerosi history—some, all or none of which may end up on air. In the meantime, they claim not to be worrying about the public'south reaction to their ending. (Benioff says that when information technology comes to endgame stress, "medication helps.") Weiss says, "I'm not proverb we don't think about it." He pauses. "The best way to go nigh it is to focus on what'due south on the desk in front of you, or what sword is beingness put in front of you lot, or the fight that is beingness choreographed in forepart of you."
What's currently earlier them seems similar enough. When I start met Clarke in Belfast, she was shooting on the back of a dragon. When I leave a calendar week afterwards, she'due south still at information technology. "30 seconds of screen time and she'southward been hither for 16 days," the episode'due south manager, Taylor, remarks at 1 point. Later, I'd call back this moment of exhaustion when Weiss described seeing the cadet for the first time. He went on to add, "It probably feels a bit less astonishing to Emilia, who sits on it for eight hours a solar day, six weeks in a row, getting blasted with water and fake snow and whatever else they decide to chuck at her through the fans." The table with the espresso machine—merely beyond Clarke's line of sight—is well trafficked.
Clarke doesn't seem bothered, though, smiling and chatting with the crew from atop the buck. Equally the state-of-the-art hydraulics move her into position, her posture shifts from millennial slump to ramrod straight. In an instant, she converts herself into the ruler of the fictional space around her. On cue, she looks over her shoulder with a face of marble. She casts into an imagined globe some emotion known simply to her. She's gazing into a future that, in the flickering moments that the story remains a undercover, merely she tin meet.
Clarke: Jean Paul Gaultier Haute Couture gown and necklace, VV Rouleaux silk flowers, Simon Harrison earrings, Dolce & Gabbana ring; Coster-Waldau: Joshua Kane jacket, Burberry shirt, Richard James scarf; Headey: Giambattista Valli Haute Couture evening gown, Dolce & Gabbana earrings; Dinklage: John Varvatos suit and shirt, Linda Bee at Grays Antiques necktie pivot; Turner: Gucci dress; Weiss: Dries Van Noten suit, COS shirt, Hardy Amies tie; Benioff: Hardy Amies conform, COS shirt, Burberry tie; Williams: Valentino dress; Harington: Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY conform jacket and shirt
On the Cover: Harington, Coster-Waldau: Dolce & Gabbana suits; Clarke: Dolce & Gabbana dress and fine jewelry, Vicki Sarge choker, VV Rouleaux collar; Headey: Dilara Findikoglu dress, Garrard fine jewelry, Erdem boots; Dinklage: John Varvatos suit
Correction: The fashion credits accompanying the original version of this story misstated the jacket worn by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. It is a Joshua Kane jacket, not a Thomas Sabo jacket.
Source: https://time.com/game-of-thrones-2017/
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