Craghas Drahar also known as Crabfeeder was a terrifying presence on screen splendidly portrayed by the actor Daniel Scott-Smith. Crabfeeder wears a mask to partially hide the greyscale which has covered his left arm and is merciless as he tortures his victims. Even though he lasted just two episodes, Scott-Smith shares that there was a lot of work that went into the character in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
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Since there weren’t many details in the book about Crabfeeder’s appearance, he says, “he’s a nasty character. So as an actor, it’s a dream. It’s nice when you have details, as well, but it’s also nice when it’s a completely open book. That gave us the freedom to do what we wanted with the character, which, on a creative level, was incredible for me and I think for the directors, as well, because we could play with it and build our own version of Crabfeeder.”
Read More: Who Is Crabfeeder Aka Craghas Drahar?
Getting The Role
Crabfeeder doesn’t really speak much, so the audition was dialogue-less. The actor says he didn’t know he was auditioning for the prequel to Game of Thrones since the project was called Red Gun. About the audition, he says, “It was all very physical”. “They wanted to see how I would physically embrace the character. In the actual breakdown, it said, ‘Ideally, if you had a mask to wear, that would be great.’ I didn’t have a mask, so I [thought] maybe I won’t get it because of that. But they were asking me about the hammering, how I’d physicalize that. They wanted to see the animalistic qualities with how I would eat something. So it was lots of little bits.”
He didn’t actually have to eat anything on camera for the audition, so it was “very much just ripping things off the bone and that kind of thing.” “I can’t imagine Crabfeeder particularly cares about dinner etiquette”, Scott-Smith jokes.
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Getting Into The Role
Daniel Scott-Smith further shares what he discussed with the director of episodes 2 and 3, Greg Yaitanes. “Craghas Drahar is seen as the bad guy, but for any bad character there’s always got to be a journey of how they got to that point,” Scott-Smith says. “We wanted to remember that there’s two sides to him. So we spoke about the idea of him being a prince, or that he calls himself a prince, so he came from some sort of higher House,” the actor explains. “We spoke about that and the gradual decline to where he is, how the greyscale might affect him physically, even mentally.”
He continues, “we wanted to show the more prince, royal side, but then we also wanted to show the more feral side, which came through when he holds the hammer”. “We wanted the idea of the hammer turning him into more of a beastly character,” says the actor.
There was a lot of hair, makeup, and prosthetic work that went into Crabfeeder’s appearance. The mask was another addition to the character that was not originally in the books. Scott-Smith says he also had an entire cast of his body taken as well. This was used to make the severed half of his body we see at the end of episode 3. Talking about that, “it’s a strange experience [to gaze upon his own dead body]. I don’t think many people would experience that normally, but it was quite surreal,” the actor shares. “It was cool, though.”
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