It must be fun to be one of the main characters on Game Of Thrones – all those sword-fights and horse-rides and battle scenes that take 55 nights to shoot in the freezing cold.
Wait, what?
That’s what poor Kit Harington and his co-stars had to endure while shooting a particularly intense and presumably freezing battle scene for season 8.
Speaking on tonight’s episode of The Graham Norton Show, Kit admits the cast were ‘on the edge of killing each other’ by the end of the ridiculously long shoot and says the upcoming series is going to be bigger than any others.
‘They have really upped the budget and gone to town. It is really exciting,’ he teased.
‘There are some incredible sequences, but I’ve woken up in the middle of the night recently thinking, “What if, after eight seasons, we’ve have mucked it up.”‘
Yeah, you and us both, Kit.
We’ve heard stories of this mythical 55-night shoot before, when GOT producer Jonathan Quinlan posted – then quickly deleted – a picture to Instagram dedicated to the cast and crew who had worked those cruel hours. ‘This is for the night dragons,’ he wrote.
‘For enduring 55 straight nights. For enduring the cold, the snow, the rain, the mud, the sheep shit of Toome and the winds of Magheramorne. When tens of millions of people around the world watch this episode a year from now, they won’t know how hard you worked.
‘They won’t care how tired you were or how tough it was to do your job in sub-freezing temperatures. They’ll just understand that they’re watching something that’s never been done before. And that’s because of you.’
Very dramatic stuff. Hopefully the battle itself will be just as epic.
And it turns out we don’t have that long to wait. The actor who plays the terrifying Night King, Vladimír Furdík, has revealed that we’ll see the the monumental battle as early as episode three in the new season.
‘In the third episode of the last season, there is a battle that the creators intended to be a historic moment in television,’ Furdík let slip at a GOT convention last year.
There’s no word on whether this battle will be the final battle, but let’s put it in context. GOT’s biggest fight so far, the Battle Of The Bastards, took 27 nights to film – a drop in the Narrow Sea compared to this shiny, new epic.
Peter Dinklage has said the ‘brutal’ episode in question makes the Battle Of The Bastards look like a ‘theme park’. Is it wrong to be excited?
Game of Thrones season 8 returns to HBO and Sky Atlantic on April 14 but you can catch up on seasons 1 to 7 on NOW TV.
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