Game of Thrones is a great show, and one of the biggest reasons for the same is that has great actors and showrunners, too. We have heard quite a few stories about the cast having fun together while being away filming for the show. We hadn’t heard new ones for quite a while now, and showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss gave us a fresh batch of filming stories about the pranks they have played with and on the stars of the show, over the years.
David Benioff and Dan Weiss were at the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW), recently, speaking on the Game of Thrones panel moderated by Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark). Starting off, they recounted the story of the time when they played the hand slap game with the beast Jason Momoa, who played Khal Drogo on the show, because, as Benioff explained : “It seemed like a really good idea at the time.”
Weiss recalled:
“We were having a lot of fun and laughing and it was funny. Then I remember looking at David and saying, ‘dude, look at your hands,’ and his hands had already started to swell up, because Jason is 250 pounds and so fast.”
Benioff continued the story, saying :
“That was the problem; I thought, ‘he’s big, but I bet I’m quicker.’ But I was not. So I went home — I’d been away from home for about a month, my wife is taking care of the kids with no help from me. I come limping in the door and my hand is swollen up like a catcher’s mitt, and she’s like ‘what the fuck is that?’ And I said ‘oh, I was playing the slap game with Jason Momoa,’ and she was just so disgusted with me.”
Benioff is married to actress Amanda Peet, and we can totally imagine her fuming over this incident. Benioff also said that the doctor said, “Oh yeah, your friend squished your hand,” and Weiss agreed that that was the medical term for the condition.
David and Dan also recounted a prank they played on Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow on the show. Benioff said:
“The easiest to pull off was when we wrote a scene for Kit Harington where his face melted off. There was a scene in the first season where he fights with a wight and the wight catches on fire and he burns his hand but we rewrote the script so his face actually melts off.”
Weiss interjected:
“It was his upper lip and all of his hair.”
Benioff continued :
“And Kit’s got great hair and he’s very proud of it and he’s got a great pout. And the page described exactly what his mangled face was gonna look like forever. He was a good sport about it, but you could tell he was really sad.”
Weiss seemed impressed with how well Kit took it :
“It was good acting, he was trying so hard to not show how brutally disappointed he was. We had a whole story about how HBO thought like he felt too Disney, too Harry Potter; he was just too pretty and they wanted to ugly him up a bit. He bought it for a while until David started laughing.”
The pair has also gotten pranked as badly as they’ve pranked.Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) pranked David and Dan by convincing them that he shaved his head before filming was about to start. Benioff recounted the story :
“He said he was getting annoyed because he wanted to get a haircut and we hadn’t approved anything. He’s like, ‘guys, I’m gonna do it, I’m just gonna cut my hair,’ and he sent us a picture where he’d shaved his head — he looked like a skinhead, and this was a couple weeks before we were supposed to start shooting. And I was like, ‘now we’re gonna have to get a fucking Prince Charming wig thing.’”
Weiss said that they were quite ticked off, with HBO’s lawyers even calling Nikolaj’s agents. Benioff explained how he managed to prank them :
“It turned out he’d taken a photo of himself from five years ago with his head shaved and sent it to us. So he got us.”
Classic.
David and Dan have also carried out several other pranks, like telling Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy) that Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) was going to kill Theon in Season 2, and makingDavid Bradley (Samwell Tarly) dress up like Henry VIII, with a codpiece “the size of a loaf of bread”, having convinced him that Sam was due for a costume makeover.
Game of pranks, eh? Talk to us in the comments, below!
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