After reading the sequence in George R.R. Martin’s original series, A Song of Ice and Fire, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss knew it would be incredibly difficult yet important to pull off the Red Wedding. As Weiss told Hibberd, “The Red Wedding was the thing we always told ourselves that if we got to that moment, and if we did it right, did it justice, then [the show would] be in a pretty good place. The energy that it injected into the story would be enough to get us through to the end of the show.”
Since the Red Wedding was detailed in Martin’s books, the actors involved knew what was coming. Madden, for one, tried to avoid spoilers. “I read [the books] season by season,” Madden recalled. “I didn’t want to preempt where Robb is going. But a thousand people spoiled it for me before I had a chance to pick up the third book. I also made the fatal flaw of googling. So that reinforced what people were hinting, saying something terrible was going to happen and giggling.”
Meanwhile, Fairley “knew what was coming.” As she told Hibberd, “It’s something that anyone who’s read the books will talk about, so people took great delight in knowing. There’s something so incredibly dramatic and brutal about the Red Wedding, the shock of it. I met somebody who read it on the plane and they were so heartbroken they left the book on the plane. For an actor to be given that part to play, you want to grab it and go straight into it.”
Chaplin agreed, saying, “I […] knew I was going to come to a demise at the end of season three. I was praying for a cool death, and when I read [the script], I was like, ‘F**k, everyone dies!’ But what it was on the page was nothing compared to what it was like on the day of shooting.”
