Gasping for breath, drowning in water is one of the most common nightmares people experience in their dreams. One Game of Thrones actress had to go through that in real, on set, for an excruciating 10 hours. Hannah Waddingham, who played Septa Unella on the show, was strapped to a table, to be tortured by Lena Headey’s Cersei Lannister. She described her harrowing experience in a recent episode of Collider’s Ladies Night.
She explained, “Definitely, other than childbirth, it was the worst day of my life. Because Lena was uncomfortable pouring liquid in my face for that long, and I was beside myself. But in those moments you have to think, do you serve the piece and get on with it or do you chicken out and go, ‘No, this isn’t what I signed up for, blah, blah, blah?’”
“The funny thing was, after we’d finished shooting it for the whole day, and people like Miguel Sapochnik, the director by the way, walking past with a cup of tea and a sandwich on-the-go and going, ‘Hi hunny, you alright?’ And I was like, ‘Not really.’ ‘The crew have just been saying we are actually really waterboarding you here.’ And I was like, ‘Yup, you don’t need to tell me that!’”
Waddingham continued, “When I got back to the hotel that night, I was going up in the left and I was standing next to Eugene (Lancel Lannister) who had had to crawl through loads of sh*t to get out of the Sept of Baylor and he was like, ‘Oh my god, what happened to you today?’ I could barely speak because I had been screaming through The Mountain’s hand, which is quite frightening as a singer to completely lose your voice, so I had no voice at all to barely whisper, bruises already coming up like I had been attacked”
“I was like, ‘I’ve basically just been waterboarded for ten hours.’ And he went, ‘Mate, I’ve just been crawling through sh*t for four days on my elbows.’ So we were like, ‘See? You haven’t been in Game of Thrones unless you’ve been really, really, battered around.’”
Have you ever been through a similar experience? Tell us in the comments below!
