The final season of Game of Thrones might have ended two weeks ago, but HBO did everyone a solid and released a behind-the-scenes documentary this past weekend to help fans get over the fact there will never be another new episode…ever. The doc was a full two hours long, and there was so much insider knowledge to digest. Here are the 11 most interesting things we learned.
Spoilers ahead for the final season of Game of Thrones and for the documentary that followed. Hop out of this post if you haven’t watched!
Kit Harington cried when he learned Jon Snow killed Dany.
Kit got the scripts for the final season three days before he was supposed to be in Belfast for the table read, but he didn’t read them like the rest of the cast. He chose to read them for the first time with everyone else present, which meant his reaction to the plot points was super genuine.
Which brings us to a clip of Kit crying upon realizing that Jon Snow killed Dany. It will wreck you, fair warning.
If that didn’t make you teary-eyed enough, here’s a clip of him on his last day on-set.
RIP my tear ducts!
The guy who played Varys seemed pretty pissed about his character’s death.
Conleth Hill, who played Varys, had a pretty different reaction to his character’s death, which you can watch here.
Basically, he’s not thrilled!
The scripts were shredded after the table read.
For security/leaks/spoiler reasons, duh. They used digital scripts for almost everything after that.
HBO
The snow on-set is actually paper.
Fun fact, all that snow in Winterfell and everywhere else isn’t actually snow, it’s just paper and water. The guy in charge of it was literally called the Head of Snow and he’s an absolute character.
HBO
Also, if real snow fell on top of the fake snow it would ruin the fake snow. The irony!
They couldn’t get the horses back to white after putting fake blood on them.
So they literally had a bunch of pink horses running around.
HBO
HBO
Emilia Clarke wore a bald cap under her wig.
Because Emilia Clarke’s hair is naturally brown, her roots would show through when she wore her wig, so the hair supervisors started putting a bald cap on her. They’d paint the bald cap to match her skin tone, then they’d put the wig on top of that. ‘Twas a process.
HBO
HBO
From the looks of it, Emilia was the first person in hair every day.
HBO flew some of the cast to Spain to create diversions.
To throw people off the scent when it came to the dragon pit scene, HBO flew certain people to the filming location in Spain who weren’t even in the scene. Kit, the Night King, Jaqen H’ghar, and the the girl who played the Waif were all there, but none of them were in the scene. Jaqen H’ghar and the Waif didn’t even appear in season eight.
That’s where this iconic picture came from….
At one point while filming, there were no toilets on-set in Ireland.
There was a major snow storm (called the Beast from the East), which meant that on one filming day there were 250 extras, all the crew, and literally zero toilets because the water in the bottoms had frozen. There were icicles hanging off the water taps.
HBO
The night shoots were absolutely insane.
One person said he got home and went to sleep at 9:30 in the morning and woke up at 1:30 in the afternoon. Another girl said they would pray to wrap at 3 a.m. instead of 6 a.m. They were at it for literal weeks.
People in Spain called Kit “Keet” because of their accent, so all the cast called him that too.
You can hear them do it at the beginning of this clip.
The extras made jackets every year.
One of the extras, Andrew McClay, was a member of the Stark Guard every single year. He was kind of the ring-leader of the extras, and they had jackets made, which is precious and adorable.
HBO
Some of the extras were friends and family of the crew.
One theme of the documentary was the sacrifice the cast and crew made in order for season 8 to happen. For example, the people in charge of the prosthetics were actually husband and wife, and they were away from their daughter for weeks at a time.
Thankfully, their daughter got to visit them on-set during filming, and she even got to be an extra in the very last scene where the wildlings are walking into the forest with Jon.
HBO
HBO
‘Scute!