Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon

by James Hibberd

  The quartet of Liam Cunningham, Carice van Houten, Stephen Dillane (Stannis Baratheon), and Tara Fitzgerald (Selyse Baratheon) formed the core of a new storyline centered at Dragonstone castle, where King Robert’s elder brother plotted to seize the Iron Throne from King Joffrey with the help of advisor Ser Davos and mysterious religious zealot Melisandre. Their first scene, where Melisandre burned statues of the Seven gods on the beach, takes place in the season two premiere.

  DAN WEISS: Stannis wants the throne not just out of greed or power lust but because he’s a man who’s always done everything by the book and the book now says, “I should be king.” He understands he’s the rightful heir, and anyone who tries to prevent him from getting the throne is violating the law.

  LIAM CUNNINGHAM: I loved the fact that Davos is from humble beginnings and is a small-time crook but had more humanity than any of the Lannisters and most of the Starks. He was never torn about his principles; they were just part of his DNA. Power had no interest for him. He’s incredibly loyal and a decent man. I felt like occasionally he spoke for the audience. But we had to hit the ground running because these relationships were already formed [in the story].

  CARICE VAN HOUTEN: It wasn’t an easy part for me. My first shooting day I had to do the burning of the gods with so many great actors there. It’s not like me to be so sure of myself. I was so nervous and shy and insecure, but I couldn’t use any of those feelings. I had to be all about the Lord of Light. Also, my dress was so fitted that I couldn’t wear anything underneath. I had never been so cold in my life.

  LIAM CUNNINGHAM: Carice would feel cold if she were dropped in a volcano. She constantly had a hot-water bottle pinned to her. She hates the cold.

  CARICE VAN HOUTEN: It’s true. I get cold in the summer. I’m the coldest person ever, which was not handy in this role. My character is never supposed to be cold. I got unlucky there.

  Dillane earned a reputation as the show’s most press-averse actor. He once explained to French outlet Libération that he had nothing to say about Thrones because he “understood neither the series nor its success” and candidly admitted to taking the role for, “among other things, the money.”

  CARICE VAN HOUTEN: Stannis is this not-pleasing character, and there’s something very interesting about watching him. Maybe the actor trying to figure out what he was doing helped make him unpredictable. I never really got the relationship between all of them.

  LIAM CUNNINGHAM: I have to defend Stephen. He’s a fantastic actor, with quite a reputation, but Stephen is not good in interviews. Stephen wears his heart on his sleeve, and he will say things that are primed to be taken out of context. He’s been much maligned for very much the wrong reasons. He’s one of the most dedicated, fantastic people to work with; there’s no ego that gets in the way of his work.

  I’ll give you an example: In the beginning of season three, I walk back into the room when it’s been assumed Davos has died during the Battle of the Blackwater. Stannis is sitting on a chair looking out at Dragonstone. When I walk in, a lesser actor would immediately stand up, take a moment, and say his line: “I thought you were dead.” Whereas Stephen glances over his shoulder and says the line in an incredibly unemotional way. He doesn’t do “trailer acting.” He doesn’t go with the easy choice.

  Gethin Anthony had one scene with Dillane, a tense hilltop parlay on horseback between Renly and Stannis, with Catelyn Stark also in attendance. Both brothers refused to back down from their self-proclaimed claims to the Iron Throne. While Anthony didn’t comment on Dillane, he rather cryptically described the filming of their scene as “educational.”

  GETHIN ANTHONY: I still feel almost confused by that scene. I learned a lot that day. I hope it came off well enough. I’m not sure it did. It was a strange experience. I think it was partly because I was so vested in it that it was hard to divorce myself from such a huge moment in this character’s journey.

  Then at the end of that scene, I said, “Can you believe I loved him once?”—a great one-liner—and then I’m supposed to gallop the horse up the cliff and away. Now, Michelle Fairley is a competition horse rider. She grew up in that area and used to ride without saddles. So she’s brilliant. Yet she’s supposed to follow me, which was embarrassing as a new horse rider. I managed it, but with much less confidence and slightly slow moving.

  The Dragonstone group’s gothic relationship had its oddest scene—the most bizarre in the whole series, really—when a naked and pregnant Melisandre gave birth to a shadow demon that went on to slay Renly.

  GETHIN ANTHONY: People often criticize Renly for being militarily naive. I’m like, “No, he wasn’t, he just didn’t see magic coming.” In a world where they don’t believe in the magic, I think that’s kind of fair enough, really.

  The birthing scene was shot at Cushendun Caves on the Northern Ireland coast in the early hours of the morning, with the “baby” created later using CGI.

  LIAM CUNNINGHAM: It was insane. It looked like a cave, but it was more like a funnel, so there was a cold wind blowing through. Carice, that poor woman, was totally naked except for a pregnancy belly prosthetic. And there’s three guys running pipework between her legs to make these air bubbles to make it move. The indignity of it. She’s absolutely terrific in the scene under really difficult circumstances.

  CARICE VAN HOUTEN: There I was with Liam next to me, pretending to give birth to this computer thing. Thank God for Liam, he really dragged me through it. It was so surreal. I was excited because this is something you don’t normally get in a script, but it was also weird to give birth to something that was going to be CGI, so I had no idea what it was going to look like. It was also cold.

  LIAM CUNNINGHAM: You have this gorgeous Dutch woman and you’re supposed to stare straight between her legs and try to do that only between “action” and “cut.” What am I supposed to be horrified by? Then “the baby” comes. They had this thing that looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy on a stick that was supposed to be the shadow baby that they used to help our eye line. But when I looked at the monitor I said to the director, “[The scene] looks like a Caravaggio painting,” and the director said, “That’s exactly what we’re going for.”

  CARICE VAN HOUTEN: In retrospect, I think: “Did I really have to be naked for this? Was giving birth to the monster not enough? Was she described as naked in the books?”* I can live with it. I’m fine. I don’t believe in regrets, but I do wonder in retrospect if that was really necessary. I’ve gotten more conscious in that regard. I’ve always defended Melisandre’s nakedness because she uses it as a weapon, and that’s true. But she used that weapon quite a lot.

  Season two was frustrating for a few of the returning actors. Jaime Lannister actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, for example, spent the year chained outdoors in the mud for nearly all of his scenes.

  NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU (Jaime Lannister): As an actor, I hated it. “Hey, you can’t just bench me, what the hell?” But it made sense for the journey he was on. He said it himself, that he is not quite well equipped for imprisonment. Sometimes you just have to be forced into not moving.

  Robb and Catelyn Stark actors Richard Madden and Michelle Fairley spent much of the season in tents while the Young Wolf waged an off-screen war against the Lannisters. “I used to go, ‘Not another bloody tent, Jesus,’” Michelle Fairley told the Popcorn Taxi film festival. “And that was simply because the budget didn’t allow for the journeying. And every time they did a bit of the journey, they arrived and entered the tent. So that’s why I spent so much of season two in a tent.”

  But Madden noted he relished such chances to flesh out Robb struggling to become a military leader despite his youthful inexperience. “He’s got so little control over his own life for someone who became king,” Madden told the Bahamas’ Tribune. “He didn’t want to be king, but he knew no one else was going to do this how it should be done, how his father would have done it, so he needed to try. Robb was putting up a mask all
the time—and if I did doing the mask right you saw him as this quite intimidating foe to Jaime Lannister for example, or as this man who can lead an army, and then you get those scenes with his mother or with Theon where for a moment that mask slips and it’s just a regular guy, he’s just a boy.”

  Peter Dinklage, however, wasn’t stuck in tents, chains, or caves. With Sean Bean gone, Dinklage was elevated to the show’s top billing (a position he’d maintain for the rest of the series) and got to enjoy, along with his character, Tyrion’s promotion to Hand of the King.

  PETER DINKLAGE: Tyrion came from great wealth, but he was treated very poorly. Now there was a newfound respect. He was like, “Hmm, looks like I can get revenge on all those high school kids who made fun of me.” Tyrion definitely enjoyed that part of himself and was trying desperately to hold on to it.

  EUGENE MICHAEL SIMON (Lancel Lannister): There’s the scene where Lancel is begging Tyrion to not reveal what he’s been doing with Cersei. I remember trying to figure out how much Lancel should grovel—I mean, he’s got a sword. We leaned into him properly begging [on his knees]. I knew it was working when Peter said, “I’m really liking this moment because Lancel is on the ground, literally beneath me.” I don’t know if there was any moment in Thrones when somebody was begging Tyrion that much. What struck me about it was Tyrion was probably capable of doing that to more than one person. He’s got that power.

  Palace intrigue at the Red Keep included Tyrion maneuvering against his conniving sister, Cersei.

  LENA HEADEY (Cersei Lannister): The thing about Cersei is she’s always covering her real feeling. There’s a lot of reptilian in Cersei. I never truly believed her when I played her. There was one moment that season where she absolutely showed Tyrion her true self. He became like a confidant almost. I loved to be in those scenes with Pete. He’s a great guy and we’ve known each other a long time, so there was an ease with it.

  DAVID BENIOFF: Nobody understands Cersei as well as Tyrion—with the possible exception of Jaime. They share a certain worldview, but Cersei is more cynical. They were clearly raised by the same father, but her experience has left her a little more bitter than Tyrion, who still has a shred of optimism.

  SIBEL KEKILLI (Shae): Even when the camera was on me, Peter would listen to me and act with me. Those kind of actors are really rare. Peter did make a lot of jokes about my English early on, and I didn’t understand them. Then my English got better and Peter said, “I can’t do jokes anymore because you’re starting to understand them!”

  SOPHIE TURNER (Sansa Stark): Peter was the most inspirational actor to watch. He’d say to the director: “This doesn’t feel right, Tyrion needs to come over here.” I wouldn’t have had the courage to do that.

  A grieving Sansa was cynically coming to believe that “the truth is always either terrible or boring,” and began confiding in her handmaiden, Shae, who was secretly Tyrion’s lover.

  SOPHIE TURNER: The heads on spikes was a turning point for Sansa when she realized that she kind of has to be independent and strong and trust no one. So [in season two], all she was thinking about was surviving. She’s suffering at the hands of Joffrey and literally has no one else. She went back to her roots of Winterfell with her clothing and her hair because she’s missing home. I found it so hard to move around in the dresses, you’re walking like a statue.

  SIBEL KEKILLI: I remember one scene Sophie had to cry. She cried and cried, and then she couldn’t stop! I felt like I should protect her, even though she’s taller than me. And since I was single at the time, she would say, “Sibel, I have a single friend and maybe he’d be interested in you.” I’m like, “Sophie, you’re fifteen and I’m thirty! I cannot date your friends.”

  One recurring King’s Landing location used for all manner of meeting scenes—the city’s “tent,” if you will—was Littlefinger’s brothel. In Westeros, most nonfamily relationships are transactional and characters are considered foolish, sometimes fatally, if they make decisions for love. Brothel scenes in Martin’s novels and the series also demonstrated yet another way the powerful dominated the powerless.

  Still, there was another, more pragmatic reason for the show’s including brothel scenes: A pay-cable drama, especially at the time of Thrones’ early seasons, was expected by subscribers to deliver sex, language, and violence at a level that ad-supported rivals could not. Early on, Thrones would occasionally package expository dialogue with nudity, a practice that blogger Myles McNutt famously dubbed “sexposition.”

  DAVE HILL (co-producer): People think brothel scenes must be fun to shoot as there’s beautiful naked people running around simulating sex acts. They’re actually stressful, because it’s technical and detail oriented. Sex on a set is so incredibly awkward because it’s obviously all fake and you’re stopping and starting and getting the angles. It’s not like being in a strip club. It’s like being in the locker room of a strip club.

  Also, a lot of those days are spent looking at extras. You’re always making sure the extras all look right and are doing the right things. And sometimes the extras will go a little too far. You’d say, “No, you can’t be distracting from the action.”

  INDIRA VARMA (Ellaria Sand): I loved doing my brothel scene. It’s just so decadent. We worked with a great girl who was totally open about showing her body in a way that’s so liberating and brilliant—not in a pornographic way, but just in an eloquent way, and I wish we could all be like that and feel that comfortable about ourselves. So we had to do a brothel scene where she was going down on me and snogging another girl and they were both naked and it was silly and fun.

  GEMMA WHELAN: I was very nervous about my scene in a brothel. It’s so strange to be thrown together with a stranger and then suddenly be so intimate. I was involved with a breast and a bottom, so that was quite overwhelming. She was such a nice girl, and we had a good giggle and then it became more relaxed. We made it work because she was so kind and made me comfortable and able to feel like I could help myself to someone’s body in that way. You want to feel like you have permission but also look like you’re not hesitating and being authentic, which is tricky to navigate.

  ESMÉ BIANCO (Ros): Crash dieting and religious exercise—there was a lot of that going on for those scenes.

  The show’s most infamous brothel scene was during the first season, when Littlefinger delivered a menacing monologue while ordering Ros and another brothel worker named Armeca (Sahara Knite) to perform a rather vigorous sex act.

  ESMÉ BIANCO: It was physically exhausting. It was boiling hot on the set, and I was pouring in sweat. The choreography of the scene was fairly basic, but there was quite a lot of, um, movement going on. I’m trying to remember things like, “Okay, at which point is Sahara’s butt meant to be there and where’s my leg supposed to be?”

  DANIEL MINAHAN: We had a lot of Italian crew when shooting that in Malta. I remember having to chase away people who were hiding in the back watching Sahara and Esmé go at it.

  ESMÉ BIANCO: It was supposed to be a closed set. I look behind me and there’s three guys all holding one flag over a light. I’m buck naked. I’m like, “Hang on a second. Since when does it take three people to hold that? They need to leave!”

  Littlefinger’s speech revealed his history with Catelyn Stark, and it foreshadowed his eventual betrayal of Ned Stark: “Do you know what I learned losing that duel?” Littlefinger rhetorically asked. “I learned that I’ll never win. Not that way. That’s their game. Their rules. I’m not going to fight them. I’m going to fuck them. That’s what I know. That’s what I am. And only by admitting what we are can we get what we want.”

  DANIEL MINAHAN: I feel like Littlefinger’s speech elevated it. We wanted it to be shocking, but also it was a big window into Littlefinger’s character. It operates on all these different levels—it’s pornographic, it’s humorous, it’s touching, it’s menacing, and it just does these hairpin turns. It reminded me of that scene in American Psycho with
Patrick Bateman and the two prostitutes; to me it was an homage to that. [Littlefinger actor Aidan Gillen] was unflappable. His head was in the game. And Esmé was a really good sport, but unfortunately when you look up “lesbian fisting,” now her name pops up.

  DAN WEISS: One of the benefits George had is that in books he could talk about what somebody was thinking. We needed to find other ways. [The brothel workers] were the only people Littlefinger could ever talk to about who he was and why he’s doing what he was doing because they were so utterly powerless that he could afford to let down his guard long enough to say them.

  AIDAN GILLEN (Littlefinger): The monologue and the [background] action were one and the same, really. It’s one of those ones where I wished I’d pushed a little harder with an idea I had in terms of simple physical distance, but didn’t. There wasn’t too much time for messing around on that schedule, and one’s ideas aren’t always right anyways. I recall learning those lines walking along Eglantine Avenue in Belfast and the many ideas I was having and realizing for the first time that it was all about Catelyn. So whatever Esmé and Sahara were doing at my instruction, my mind was twenty years away in reverie, melancholic, turning bitter. Having played many scenes showing as much skin myself in the past, I see that all as a practicality and nothing that would faze me personally—and it definitely wouldn’t faze Littlefinger.

  ESMÉ BIANCO: It was my first time working with Aidan, and it was the only time I’ve ever been completely starstruck to the point where I couldn’t form a coherent sentence. I don’t know why it happened with Aidan. He has this calm, mysterious, striking presence, and I had to do this full-on nude scene with him. Finally, my makeup artist was like, “Esmé, he’s a really nice guy, stop being weird and say hello.” I think Aidan realized something was going on, because he came up and was like, “Hello, Esmé. How are you?”—like very deliberate.