As the cast and crew of Game of Thrones prepare to film season 8, star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) revealed something surprising about the security measures in place this year: apparently, security is so tight that the actors won’t even have access to scripts; they’ll get their lines fed to them on set through earpieces.
Coster-Waldau dropped this info during an appearance on the Scandinavian talk show Skavlan, where he discussed how the security measures on the show have evolved over the years. Have a watch:
“The first season we got the scripts like you should get them and then you could sit and do notes and stuff,” he says. “And then after a couple of years, they got paranoid because there was some leaks so we had to get them only digital, on a PDF file.” After that, security tightened even further, and the cast had to get their scripts through verified email addresses, which included extra steps. Those scripts were watermarked so HBO would know who leaked them if they leaked. Finally, HBO suffered a massive hack, and things got even more extreme.
And then the hack happened, so now we’re not even going to get the script. Now we are going to do a scene, we will be told what’s going to happen and then we roll. We’re all going to have earpieces for the scene and then someone’s going to tell you the line and then your going to do the line.
This may not be the whole story. After all, multiple cast members have said that they all got together this past Sunday and Monday to read through the entire season, which is born out by all the cast sightings in Belfast. And Liam Cunningham (Davos) said that he “got [all the scripts],” even if he wasn’t able to open them. So it’s doubtful that the cast members will be fed the lines for the first time on set. Still, the point is taken: security is crazy tight.
All this to keep people from knowing the plot ahead of time. Coster-Waldau previously told the Press Association that he thinks it’s just a “tiny, tiny fraction of the people who love the show” who actually seek out spoilers. I wonder if he’s seen how many people subscribe to the Freefolk subreddit.
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