HBO has had to face many controversies over the years and several of them were thanks to their biggest show, Game of Thrones. In 2012, the show was embroiled in one of its earliest fiascos when fans spotted the severed head of former US President George W Bush, hoisted on a pike in a scene.
The scene in question featured in the show’s first season. A side profile of the head is visible next to Septa Mordane’s. While the full face is not clearly visible, the features looked exactly like Bush’s.
The channel had to offer an apology and called it a careless mistake. “We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologised immediately for this inadvertent, careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production,” HBO said in a statement.
Creators DB Weiss and David Benioff had talked about the prosthetic head in the DVD commentary. They said that there was no intention of making a political statement and they simply had to use ‘whatever head was lying around’.
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“We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc,” they said in a statement. “We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. … After the [Bush] scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W Bush. … We meant no disrespect to the former president and apologise if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.”
HBO was so serious about rectifying the mistake that it said the scene would never appear again in reruns or on DVD editions. Beats leaving a plastic coffee cup in a frame by a mile, doesn’t it?
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