Thrones, drones and secrets that stay untold

As season seven of ‘Game Of Thrones’ begins, Craig McLean goes on set with the stars of the biggest and most cloak-and-dagger show on TV

ON Belfast docks, they’re preparing for war. Here in the Titanic Quarter — named after the city’s previous biggest production — the cast, crew and creative departments of Game of Thrones are hard at work. It is early days in the filming of season seven of the hit fantasy drama, but already a sense of an ending infuses proceedings.

As its legions of fans are well aware, the battle for Westeros is reaching a climax, with the rival Houses of Stark, Lannister and Targaryen converging for an almighty clash. The end is nigh in television terms, too — there are only two truncated series and 13 episodes remaining of this global phenomenon.

In the armoury tent, piles of freshly forged weapons — broadswords, rapiers, epees — are stacked high. In the Leatherwork and Metalwork ateliers, racks of uniforms and armour are being stitched and welded. In the costume department, nine cutters, pattern-makers and dressmakers are busy crafting outfits for King’s Landing, home of the southern Lannisters. These will be shipped to Spain, where the current ruler on the Iron Throne, Cersei Lannister (played by Lena Headey), films her exterior scenes.

The sheer scale of the production, and the attention to detail, is extraordinary. From the outset, when HBO greenlit the show in 2008, the network has been determined to do justice to the vision of George R R Martin, the author upon whose novels the series is based, to reflect his books in all their ambition and complexity, and to create a world that looks authentic (Westeros is based, loosely, on England in the mid to late 15th century during the Wars of the Roses).

Thus, the kaleidoscope of accoutrements in Game of Thrones’ cavernous prop store: wooden furniture, kitchenware, carts, and, rather shockingly, a cardboard box containing 10 (real) dead rabbits, little paws sticking stiffly from the top, five marked for Spain, five destined for Winterfell, muddy home of the northern Starks (exteriors shot in rural Co Down). These jostle for space with an entire shelf of chopped heads (not real), relics of the standout episode from season six, Battle of the Bastards.

There are also models of chicken-sized baby dragons, a reminder that the series is only inspired by history, not based on it.

Creating all this requires huge budgets, some $10m per episode. And huge manpower: at peak production, 120 crew members work on Game of Thrones. Filming takes place on six stages 100,000 sq ft in size. Out at Banbridge, 25 miles away and another shooting base, the show’s engineers dammed the River Ban to help construct a 100ft drawbridge.

Exterior scenes for the towering defensive barrier that is The Wall (a structure that protects humans from the undead and monstrous White Walkers) are shot in Iceland, but for the interior, the production team built a 250ft-long ice tunnel at a quarry near Larne, Co Antrim.

At the heart of all of this are a group of young actors for whom Game of Thrones has been a career-changing experience, not to mention a lucrative one — six years since the show’s launch, the key cast reportedly earn $1.1m per episode, with that figure possibly as much as doubling when reruns and syndication are factored in.

“This is probably going to be the most important job of my life,” says Kit Harington, who was cast straight out of drama school. The 30-year-old Londoner plays Jon Snow, formerly dismissed as the show’s “bastard”. Well, one of them. Now he’s the newly anointed King in the North. It’s a war dividend resulting from the unhappy — and usually brutal — deaths of most of his Stark relatives in the preceding seasons. “It’s a huge thing and it’s very close to my heart,” he says.

What will he miss when the series finally wraps (most probably in May 2018)? “As far as the character goes, I’ll miss this,” Harington says, gesturing down at the full battle regalia he is wearing: big boots, big cloak, big furs. “The costumes are so incredible, [and so are] the fights I get to do.”

The greatest Jon Snow fight so far, the epic Battle of the Bastards, in which Harington’s character was almost crushed to death beneath a mass of bodies and horses before fighting his way to victory, lasted 20 minutes on screen, but took the cast, crew, 70 horses and 600 extras four weeks to film — longer than it normally takes to shoot an entire hour-long episode.

For Harington it was an especially meaningful triumph; he’s claustrophobic, something he admitted to the creative team before filming.

“I’ve got a few fears,” Harington says. “One’s spiders — I’m just a bit scared of spiders. But of mortal fears, [claustrophobia] is up there — at festivals, if things just get a bit too crowded, I panic.”

More than likely, though, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Judging by season seven’s trailer, the forthcoming episodes will feature even more Herculean clashes, not least due to the participation of three giant, fire-breathing dragons.

The woman who knows the most about this fantastical element is Emilia Clarke, the 30-year-old British actress who portrays Daenerys Targaryen, the Mother of Dragons. As much a diplomat as a warrior, Daenerys had seemed one of Game of Thrones’ few unalloyed “good guys” up until series six, when a darker, more ruthless side to the character emerged.

Are we about to witness her unleashing fire-breathing dragon hell on her queenly rival? “Well, they always say with the Targaryens, it’s a toss of the coin, it’s either one or the other,” Clarke says, alluding to a gene pool not untouched by insanity. But that is all she’ll say on the topic. Like everyone concerned with the series, from armourers to carpenters to dressmakers to producers to leading actors, Clarke is forbidden from revealing any plot developments.

That secrecy shrouds everything you see and everyone you meet on the Game of Thrones set. It’s a show that isn’t afraid to kill off big actors and major characters — Sean Bean’s Ned Stark was beheaded in season one, his son and wife (played by Richard Madden and Michelle Fairley) were slain in the classic ‘Red Wedding’ episode — and the showrunners, David Benioff and Dan ‘D B’ Weiss, are understandably anxious to preserve the integrity of their plot twists.

The phobia surrounding leaks is a reflection of both the international commercial value of HBO’s blockbuster, and also of the mania surrounding the show. Tens of thousands of fans constantly debate the plot on online forums, setting out their theories about who will finally claim the Iron Throne, and social media is regularly sent into meltdown after one of Game of Thrones’ signature shocks.

Secrecy became a particular priority at the end of season five, when Jon Snow was, to all intents and purposes, murdered. But when season six began broadcasting last spring, it was revealed that he had been brought back from the dead by the sorceress Melisandre (Carice van Houten). Still, the production’s fear of loose lips sinking ships meant that, for a while, even Harington didn’t know he still had a job.

“We get the scripts before each season, and there was a scary two weeks where I’d read the whole season [five]. And I was dead at the end of it. And I didn’t know whether I would come back or not,” says Harington. “And it was David and Dan who told me at the beginning of [shooting] of season five that I would be coming back and that I would have quite a lot to do in season six.”

But this meant that during the shooting of that season, Harington had to keep a low profile, onset and on the streets of Belfast. (“Spy” drones, sent by inquisitive individuals, regularly hover over the exterior shooting locations, looking for clues.)

“Last year I had an apartment that was kind of off the beaten track,” he says. “And this is the most fun and wonderful group of people I’ve ever been with on anything — but then when you’re segregated off from them, it makes it feel like a different show. So last year suffered a little bit on the social side of things for me.”

Did he tell anyone that he was coming back?

“Close friends and family, even though David and Dan said, ‘Look, don’t… ’cause the more you tell people the more chance of it [leaking out].’ And we did want to keep it a secret — it was a big spoiler. The hardest thing was crew and cast members — there were a lot of them I couldn’t tell. I think a lot of them knew — except Sophie! The most gullible person…” he says with a grin.

Sophie Turner, at 21 one of the show’s youngest stars, plays Lady Sansa Stark. She tells me she and Maisie Wil- liams (20) — who plays her sister Arya Stark — have tattoos marking the date of their casting — “07.08.09” — although Turner had hers inked in peach to avoid upsetting her mother. And, like Harington, she has had her fair share of gruelling plot lines.

Firstly she was married off to pathologically cruel boyking Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson). Then she was kidnapped and raped by pathologically cruel bastard Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon). Even in a show notorious for its violence, sexual and otherwise, the latter scene attracted criticism. Did it go too far? “I don’t think it was over the line,” Turner replies. “Game of Thrones is based on Tudor times and the War of the Roses, and those kinds of things happened [then]. And we are not a show that will shy away from that.

“You know, the reaction was strong, and I thought that was appropriate. It was really great that we managed to get the conversation going. It’s inspired me — I’ve now linked up with a charity called Women for Women International which is all about [helping] women who have been shunned from society, having been raped, in less economically developed countries.”

At some point later this year, everyone will reconvene in Belfast for one last time. Season eight will comprise only six episodes, although one or two of these are expected to be the length of a feature film. For cast as well as rabid fans — and television’s post-Thrones historical yarns like Vikings, Outlander and the short-lived The Bastard Executioner just don’t cut the mustard — adjusting to a non-Game of Thrones world is a pressing concern.

Clarke, typically, obviously, won’t be drawn on how it will all climax. To the question of whether Daenerys will end up queen, the Berkshire native jokes: “Of my little village? Probably!”

The seemingly preternaturally cool Turner, who’s been acting all her adult life, admits to some collywobbles. “I get very panicked when I’m out of work,” she says, although a new and recurring role in the X-Men franchise must help.

Harington, though, will happily wash that show right out of his hair. He’s been sporting mandatory lengthy northern locks from day one. When he shot 2014’s World War I adaptation Testament of Youth, his thick thatch was crammed under a wig.

“Yeah,” he beams, running a hand through his shaggy hair, the relief already in his face, “that can come off!” © Telegraph

‘Game of Thrones’ Season 7 premieres tomorrow on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV at 2am, repeated later at 9pm