Now haunting Alberta: Jon Snow’s Ghost
Meet Quigley, the Arctic wolf that plays direwolf sidekick Ghost on Game of Thrones
As Game of Thrones continues to tease out the fate of the great and possibly late Jon Snow, his albino direwolf sidekick, Ghost, is alive and well and living north of Calgary.
Quigley, a nine-year-old Arctic wolf, was cast as Ghost on the HBO fantasy drama last season. Andrew Simpson, who has trained species such as bears, birds and bugs as animal actors for 20 years at his company Instinct, confirms Quigley will return as Ghost in the Season 6 premiere on April 24.
“It’s very hard to keep a secret,” Simpson, a Thrones fan himself, agonizes. “Everybody calls me and asks me about Jon Snow and Ghost, and what happens. I want to tell the world, but I can’t.”
What the Scottish trainer can say is that the Thrones crew came to Simpson’s Instinct Ranch to film a scene with Quigley, but no actors. The shoot itself was relatively quick, as most of the hurdles were overcome before the cameras started to roll.
“You have to find a compromise between what the director wants to see and what an animal can do,” he says of planning an animal shoot. Instinct counts The Revenant, Vikings, Borat and Braveheart among its projects.
Unlike human actors, who quiz their directors about their character’s motivation, 90 per cent of the time an animal actor’s performance is inspired by food rewards. Cooked chicken breast, cooked garlic steak and hotdogs are on the menu for Instinct’s wolves, though Quigley’s food reward of choice is bacon.
Most of Simpson’s wolf work requires a snarling shot, which Simpson can deliver. One common request that’s a challenge to fulfil is a scene where a running wolf is shot.
“It’s very hard to make an animal look like it’s running full steam and then collapsing,” he says. “Usually that’s the time they bring in the ani- matronics or the CG.”
Thrones only works with real wolves, Simpson says, though they are digitally enlarged in post-production to become hulking direwolves. Digital innovations have transformed how animals are depicted onscreen since Simpson first started in the industry, working with dingos in Australia on A Cry in the Dark and Quigley Down Under, the film that Simpson’s Quigley was named for.
Despite increasingly dazzling examples of digital menageries, most recently Disney’s live-meets-digital Jungle Book, Simpson says wolves have yet to be recreated with the same level of detail as a live animal.
“It’s a lot easier to make animals like an elephant, a rhinoceros, even lions, tigers and leopards, because they either have no hair or the hair they have is very short,” he says. “No one yet has mastered the art of making hair for a wolf. One of the hard parts is that the computers want the hair to go all in the same direction, which never happens. You see a real wolf out and a bit of wind comes, and half his body hair moves one way and half moves the other.”
So how did Quigley score such a pivotal role on HBO’s most watched show in history? Simpson lists three qualities that make him the Kit Harington of the pack.
“He’s a great acting wolf. He’s very nice with people. And he’s damn good-looking.”