One of the most elaborate on-set pranks during all of Thrones was courtesy of Harington and Hannah Murray, the second of whom played wildling Gilly. In a scene where Gilly accompanied Samwell Tarley (John Bradley), her on-screen love interest and Harington’s on-screen best friend, the two decided to play a huge trick on Bradley that required tons of costumes and cooperation from the creative team.
Weiss recalled, “Hannah Murray had long had the sh*ttiest costumes on Game of Thrones; she’d been in a burlap sack for five years. She was so happy to finally get into a real piece of clothing. So Kit and Hannah thought it would be funny to play a joke on John and let him think he was going to get a new costume too.”
“Kit and I came up with the idea that John should have a new costume and it should be really stupid,” Murray added. “We thought we’d tell him he had a new stupid costume and he’d be like, ‘Oh, no!’ and that would be it. Then it became this bigger, more elaborate thing than we ever imagined.”
The showrunners helped Harington and Weiss out and got the costume department in on the joke, which eventually produced something that looked like a “Renaissance-fair fool.” As Weiss said, “We thought it would be great to make the costume ludicrous but just believable enough to not know it was a gag, so he’d think he would be wearing this on-screen. It was all rental stuff, very Henry the Eighth, with Tudor bloomers and a massive codpiece.”
The victim of the prank, Bradley, was horrified: “I looked so bad and ridiculous, it was unbelievable. There was a huge vulgar codpiece — though flattering, to be sure. The reason I bought it is because we’d never seen Sam at home before, and [his parents] think he’s an idiot. Maybe Sam dressed like an idiot before he came to Castle Black [to join the Night’s Watch].”
Murray remembered, “He was talking about it all the time. ‘Have you seen my new costume? My hat has been made comically small.’ He was really annoyed. I had to keep going, ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’ Eventually I went to David and was like, ‘Are we going to tell him this is a joke?’ And David was all, ‘Oh yeah, we probably should.'” Bradley, in retrospect, can’t believe he bought it: “You always think you’re not going to fall for pranks. You always think, ‘I’ll see through that,’ and I cannot believe I didn’t see through it.”
Game of Thrones, minus the pranks, is available to stream in its entirety on HBO Max now.
