The Night King is now one of the most familiar and haunting figures in all of pop culture. His silhouette alone is every bit as iconic to Game of Thrones as the Iron Throne itself. But The Art of Game of Thrones, by Emmy-winning production designer Deborah Riley, reveals an original concept for the character that was wildly different from the figure that skulked around the North of Westeros for four seasons. That design, along with hundreds of others, is rendered in lush detail in the new art book available from Insight Editions on November 5, but Riley and prosthetics designer Barrie Gower gave Vanity Fair some specific insight into the dramatic transformation of the Night King himself as well as a closer look at both some of Daenerys’s fiery moments and the evolution of the direwolves over the years.
The process of translating the ideas of the Game of Thrones writers room into the realities of what we see onscreen always started with a season outline from the writers and Riley’s team of concept artists. Often the artwork—created by multiple members of the team—included photorealistic depictions of the familiar Thrones cast. But in the case of the Night King—who made his chilling debut in Season 4, Episode 4 “Oathkeeper”—Riley’s team didn’t necessarily have an actor or even a character design to reference when taking their first pass at creating the icy chamber where a baby was transformed into a White Walker. As Riley told Vanity Fair via email, her team had to create a “stand-in” character as a placeholder. Gower, who was ultimately responsible for creating the finished look of the Night King, said the note he got was to create something “regal” with “familiar White Walker traits.” But Gower’s final design and this early concept art may have varied so much because, unlike with some of the other elements of the show, neither he nor the artists could really consult the books for inspiration.
As many book readers may have tried to tell you over the years, the Night King as he exists in the show doesn’t really have a counterpoint in George R.R. Martin’s novel. In Martin’s book there’s an ancient and legendary figure known as the Night’s King (note the apostrophe) who was the 13th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. (To give you a sense of how ancient we’re talking, Jon Snow was the 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch.) The Night King first appeared in the fourth season of Game of Thrones, right about the time the show started taking wilder divergences from Martin’s source material. (And right around the time Martin wrote his last script for the show.)
When asked about the show-invented character called the Night King in 2015, Martin simply said: “As for the Night’s King (the form I prefer), in the books he is a legendary figure, akin to Lann the Clever and Brandon the Builder, and no more likely to have survived to the present day than they have.” The early concept design seen in The Art of Game of Thrones, a crumbling King who resembles the ghostly Ringwraiths of The Lord of the Rings, may seem more in line with Martin’s idea of the character—not the only time that has happened—but he’s not immediately intimidating and hardly suited for the battles the show version would have to fight over the coming season. The character we briefly see in Season 4 wore imposing armor, not kingly robes. As for the ruler under those clothes? Enter Gower whose team took that directive of “regal” in a much different direction:
