Game of Thrones extras from across Northern Ireland have come together to perform a very special version of the Night’s Watch oath for the watchers on our hospital wards.
Their touching ode to NHS workers even featured extras who are already fighting on the frontline against Coronavirus.
Laurence Doherty, who brought many of the extras together in an online community, told Belfast Live they wanted to do something special for those saving lives during the crisis.
The 49-year-old, who featured in the pilot of the hit HBO show and saw it right through to the final season, explained: “We wanted to thank the NHS for what they have been doing… because we think they are doing an incredible job.
“I have been an extra for 20 years and I run a community of extras called the extra family. There’s about 1,000 of us and we all look after each other on jobs.
“In the last couple of months there hasn’t been any work because all the productions have halted so a couple of weeks ago I had seen a sort of similar video and I though ‘what could the extras do now that we are all stuck at home?’
That’s when he came up with the idea for a heartfelt twist on the Night’s Watch oath from Game of Thrones as he said it was a show most of them had worked on.
“It starts with ‘Night gathers and so my watch begins’,” said the Newtownabbey man.
“That was rattling around in my head and I was thinking ‘you could almost change that to reflect what’s going on in all of these hospitals up and down the country because people are in there 24-7, exhausted and trying to help people’.”
After running the idea past the group, he said “people were very enthusiastic about it”.
So he put the call out for performances of the special version of the oath and said he got over 40 videos back, which friends Clare Childs and Ross Magee helped him pull together for the final video.
“They were amazing. They really stepped up,” he continued.
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“We encouraged the extras to share it with people who have been affected by the pandemic and people who they know who are workers.
“It really caught on [and] we were very happy with it.
“They poured their heart and soul into it so I was very proud of them all.
“A number of people in there work for the NHS or used to. That’s a real fireman and real nurses.
“That’s the great thing about extras, they all have these other lives that are directly or indirectly impacted by this.
“They were hungry for an outlet and this was the perfect way of bringing them all together to say thank you to the NHS.
“I got some lovely messages back from people in the NHS to say they were very touched by it.”
