During filming for Game of Thrones season 6, actress Sibel Kekilli, who played Shae, showed up on set and in costume for a scene set in Meereen. At the time, fans wondered at that — how could Shae return to the show? Would she be in a dream sequence? Did she have a twin sister? Would you make like Jon Snow and rise from the dead?
It came to nothing, because in the end, Kekilli was nowhere to be seen in season 6. Apparently, this was just the producers having fun. They knew fans were photographing the set, so why not give them something to photograph?
It’s one of the many ways the Game of Thrones machines deals with spoilers — if the fans can’t tell which scenes are real and which are fake, they don’t have as good an idea of what to expect. If you can believe Kit Harington, they continued that strategy when filming season 7. According to an interview he gave to Jimmy Kimmel back before season 7 aired, he said that the production “faked some scenes” to throw people off the scent.
“We did fake some scenes,” he said. “We put together people in situations where we knew the paparazzi was around so they’d take photos and that’d get on the internet.” Harington even gave some specifics, saying he participated in three fake scenes which took around five hours each to shoot.
Now that season 7 is in the can, we thought it’d be interesting to try and see what scenes were faked. We covered the behind-the-scenes goings-on pretty thoroughly, after all — was there anything that the production filmed in plain view of paparazzi but which didn’t make it onto the screen?
As it turns out, not really. Or at least, there was nothing as blatant as having Sibel Kekilli come on set and get into costume. There were a couple of little things. For example, at one point, a fan spotted someone at a London airport waiting for Tobias Menzies, who plays Edmure Tully. This particular flight was returning from Belfast, the production nerve center of Game of Thrones.
Edmure, obviously, didn’t show up in season 7. But of course, this by itself proves nothing — Menzies is allowed to fly from London to Belfast without having filmed scenes for Game of Thrones.
As far as behind-the-scenes stuff for season 7 goes, the closest thing we had to a Kekilli moment was this video of a stuntman getting burned by a gout of flame:
The scene is filmed at night near Malpartida de Cáceres, in the same general area where the show shot the Loot Train Attack from “The Spoils of War.” We suppose it could have been part of the battle, but we don’t see this particular shot represented anywhere onscreen, nor does the battle happen at night. Then there are the lines. After the guy is set on fire, someone shouts “No, Khaleesi!” and “What sort of witchcraft is this?” Again, we don’t hear that anywhere in season 7.
Was this scene filmed to throw fans off? Because what’s going on is so ambiguous, it’s hard to be sure. It’s also hard to believe that the production would go to the trouble and expense of setting a dude on fire just to give fans a fake spoiler, but it also doesn’t pay to underestimate HBO, so it’s inconclusive. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if this turned up as a deleted scene on the season 7 Blu-ray release.
If this is a deleted scene rather than a fake one, we couldn’t find any scenes clearly designed to confuse fans. That means that Harington was either lying in his Kimmel interview or that he did film fake scenes and no one noticed, which must be doubly frustrating.
In any case, it’s worth thinking about this stuff as filming on season 8 starts up. There have been already been reports that the production is filming multiple endings to the show in order to prevent the real one from getting out. If that’s true, faking individual scenes is still very much on the table.
One more thing: we didn’t see Gendry wearing this super-cool cloak in the scene where he left Dragonstone in “Eastwatch”:
Justice for the cloak!
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