‘Thrones’ horse master proves indispensable
Camilla Naprous takes care of some of the biggest stars on “Game of Thrones” — its horses.
She joined the series during its first season for what was intended as a two-week job coordinating a jousting scene. That was almost nine years ago. As the show’s horse master, she is responsible for coordinating and choreographing the many equine performers.
She and her brother Daniel run The Devil’s Horsemen, a company based in Buckinghamshire, England, which provides horses to an array of film and TV projects, including “Wonder Woman” and “The Crown.”
“Every horse you see currently is pretty much one of ours,” she says.
Their father, originally from France, fell in love with horses as a young man and once worked at the Lido, a Paris nightclub famed for its jousting horses. He eventually moved to England and, in the 1960s, started his own company.
Since they took over the reins (if you will) of the family business a decade ago, Naprous and her brother have taken the company to another level — and “Game of Thrones” has been a large part of that expansion, providing unique opportunities to be bolder and more creative with their horses.
A high point was “The Battle of the Bastards” — or as she calls it, “BOB” — the penultimate episode of “Game of Thrones” Season 6, which featured an epic showdown between Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon).
“That was the first real time we could bring a hundred horses out and really just go to town,” she says. “It was incredible working with Kit because he’s so great on a horse. Being able to have a real actor on the horse galloping toward the army was exciting. I hate watching scenes with doubles.”
She estimates the horse department employed about 160 people for the episode — grooms, lorry drivers, trainers, assistants and stunt riders.
Another favorite is the loot train attack sequence in last season’s harrowing “The Spoils of War,” a.k.a. the episode that featured Daenerys riding her dragon in battle and a horde of Dothraki slinging arrows on horseback.
Naprous recalls how showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff gave her the space to do what she wanted in the episode. “There was a brilliant bit on the outline when I first read the script that just went, ‘And Camilla whatever you can bring. Go free.’”
And so she did, designing a special rig that allowed the stunt riders to stand up and brandish their weapons while riding, all to showcase the skills of the Dothraki while keeping the horses safe.
“We kind of wanted a ‘Mad Max’ feel on horseback,” she explains by phone from the set of her latest project, a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”
The sequence also involved the “logistical nightmare” of transporting 60 horses from England to Spain, a three-day journey over land and sea.