Badass moments aren’t hard to come by on Game of Thrones. Each episode delivers its own unique thrills and chills, some of which linger long after the hour is ever. Case in point: remember in season 1 when Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa) dripped a guy’s tongue out during a fight?
In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Momoa gives the story behind the carnage. In this scene, Drogo faces off with one of his lieutenants, Mago, who does not approve of Daenerys Targaryen asserting her authority over the khalasar. The fight is quick, and mostly consists of Drogo dodging attacks while talking about all the horrible things he’s going to do to Mago’s body in the next couple seconds. Drogo makes good when he slashes Mago’s throat open and then shoves his hand into the wound and pulls out Mago’s tongue. Bloody, brutal, brilliant. It was one of the first notable deviations from George R. R. Martin’s source material and we loved every second of it.
The set-up for the scene was challenging. Mago was played by Ivailo Dimitrov, Momoa’s stunt double from Conan the Barbarian, and since he only spoke Bulgarian, getting him to wrap his tongue around the Dothraki language was tricky. Momoa recalls what episode director Daniel Minahan told him: “You hired him, you gotta teach him.”
Thankfully, the scene looks absolutely fantastic on screen. Dimitrov’s history of stunt work — and his rapport with Momoa — clearly paid off. We thought Drogo was badass before, but this left no room for argument.
Also on set that day: Momoa’s 4-year-old daughter, who seemed to come out of it undamaged.
I’m covered in blood, and she’s sitting there knitting with the wardrobe department. She’s so cute. I’m like, “Hi, baby!” [She’s like,] “I love you, Papa!” Then I’d go and be like, “Raaa!” She was, like, 4 years old. “Papa’s just playing” — not fazed by it at all. It was a very memorable moment.
To say the least.
As we mentioned before, this moment did not appear in Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. It sounds a little like Momoa pushed for himself:
I always wanted to see [Drogo] go to battle. I didn’t want to do some elaborate fight scene. I think it’s [just as] intimidating to whisper in someone’s ear and go, “Stop that.” You can just parry; I don’t need to do any fight moves. Then you just take the guy’s sword and slice his throat out. I was like, “We can get a chicken breast, and we’ll just cover my hand in blood, and that’ll do it.” And then within days they had this f—ing throat and tongue attachment, and it looked amazing.
And if you’re wondering, yes, he did take something to remember the scene by. “I’m a big fan of taking the things that I worked with,” Momoa said. “So I have the souvenir of the tongue and the throat. That’s just on my desk.”
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