The most dangerous ‘Game’
Wanna-be kings square off again in HBO’S epic series
not in my control. I can’t really try and change the course of his fate — I can only keep being nice to George Martin, I guess. Keep buying him presents.” When it came time for Weiss and co-executive producer David Benioff to march to war, they came helmets in hand to ask for enough money to film a large-scale land and sea clash known to Martin fans as the Battle of Blackwater.
The books were written, after all, by the showrunner for the ’80s series “Beauty and the Beast,” who was so fed up with what he considered the stinginess of the industry that he set out to write a saga of a scope that would make it virtually unfilmable. But HBO gave the series with the best
pro- duction value on television a 15% budget increase. Where the heck were they when Martin was working in TV?
“We all start out with a budget, and then it’s up to them where we need to scrimp and where we need to spend,” says Sue Naegle, HBO’S president of entertainment. “So obviously, the Battle of Blackwater was incredibly important to get right. We were never going to be the place that said, ‘Oh, “Game of Thrones,” yeah, it would be great if you could film it on a back lot at Universal,’ but we are responsible.”
It helps that the first season was both critically lauded and relatively popular (the finale drew 3 million viewers).
So the cast, crew and producers of “Game of Thrones” found themselves in Malta, Northern Ireland, Croatia and Iceland — and hoping to survive off screen as well as on.
“I was concerned about falling into a crevasse in Iceland,” Benioff said during a recent Q&A session. “One of the perils of shooting on a glacier.”
A ctor Kit Harington knows the producers behind “Game of Thrones” would go to the ends of the Earth to raise the stakes for the hit HBO series’ second season.
He realized it right about the time they sent him to the actual ends of the Earth, the glaciers of Iceland, for filming.
Those glaciers are the perfect stand-ins for the land north of the Wall in the adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic “A Song of Ice and Fire,” in which Harington’s Jon Snow and his band of the Night Watch are stalked by all sorts of terrors. There were problems, though: Without the runners bringing hot tea between takes, the actors could barely move their hands to grip their swords.
To paraphrase the slogan from “Game of Thrones’” first season, winter was coming.
“There was one day it got scary: it was minus 35 Celsius in a blizzard and we started to lose the feeling in our fingers and toes, “the actor told The News. “Your face would be going so red raw that you didn’t look exactly attractive on screen. To give you an idea, it was so cold that people’s beards — and we had a lot of beards there — had to keep shaving off the ice.
“Those costumes look warm, but they don’t retain any heat whatsoever. It’s quite amazing how good they look but how useless they are at keeping you warm.”
As fans will quickly learn when season two opens Sunday at 9 p.m., there’s little warmth left in Westeros as the kingdom is plunged into a war between five wanna-be kings vying for the Iron Throne.
The first episode opens in the aftermath of the gruesome beheading of Ned Stark (seasonone star Sean Bean) by order of sadistic boy king Joffrey (Jack Gleeson). His mother, Cersei (Lena Headey), has lost all semblance of control over her son; her brother Tyrion (Emmy winner Peter Dinklage) plots behind the scenes to contain the damage. “As the second season will make abundantly clear, Joffrey is not the guy you want sitting in the big chair,” is how co-executive producer D.B. Weiss puts it.
He’s not the guy a lot of others want sitting there, either, especially with rumors rampant that Joffrey isn’t the rightful heir. And as armies converge, deposed Princess Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) plots her own power grab, even though she’s stranded in a desert half a world away with her three newborn dragons.
In short, expect more heads to roll.
“The violence is really shocking sometimes, especially when people you love are killed off, which happened this season when I saw something happen [during filming] and I was kind of crying,” says Headey. “I didn’t want to see any more.
“That’s why I love the show as a fan. It doesn’t follow formula. You can kill off even the most beloved character anytime.”
She adds that she’s still in shock over the episode in which the face on the billboards ended up a severed head on a spike.
Headey says some in the cast have read all of Martin’s books — the fifth of the seven-book series, “A Dance of Dragons,” was released last year after a six-year wait — to learn the fate of their characters. Others, like Headey, refuse to because, as she says, “I don’t want to know.”
“As an actor, I want Jon Snow to go on,” says Harington, who has read every page. “But unfortunately it’s