With so many moving parts and such high standards to uphold, it's always possible that something
is going to go wrong on the set of Game of Thrones.
Throughout the show's eight seasons, a number of performers have suffered for their art.
Here's how.
Sandor Clegane is so fearsome that the character earned one of the coolest nicknames in all
of Game of Thrones: "The Hound."
He's survived trial by combat, a massacre by the Freys, and being thrown off a cliff
by Brienne of Tarth.
The actor who portrays Clegane, Rory McCann, got a bit battered, too.
"You want to cut my throat?
GET ON WITH IT!"
The seventh season episode "Beyond the Wall" finds the Hound and others waging war against
the Night King and his forces.
Clegane has to carry a wight through much of the trek, forcing McCann to dash here and
there, sometimes across real ice, while the actor playing the undead creature twisted
and tumbled on his shoulders.
It all left McCann with such intense pain that he sat for an interview with the Sydney
Morning Herald while holding an ice pack to his leg.
McCann told the paper,
"I had this guy on my shoulder for days and days.
It didn't work with a dummy so I had to carry a real guy and we had to run and run."
Jon Snow is the sensitive, brooding, and sometimes pouty leading man of the Game of Thrones universe,
but you can't blame him for that, really, because a lot of bad stuff has happened to
him.
"For the watch!"
Playing Jon Snow has been much more pleasant for actor Kit Harington.
Game of Thrones brought him international stardom, an Emmy nomination, and the hand
in marriage of co-star Rose Leslie.
But also, quite nearly, permanent mutilation.
Filming a dragon-flying scene for the show's eighth season involved Harington mounting
a massive, flailing mechanical apparatus called a "buck."
His character had to almost fall off, forcing Harington to hold on… and to endure a tight
squeeze.
"And my right ball got trapped, and I didn't have time to say 'Stop!'
And I was being swung around."
Fortunately, Harington finished the scene and escaped with all of his parts intact.
Since Season 2, actress Gemma Whelan has played Yara Greyjoy, the now undisputed Queen of
the Iron Islands.
She's a relentless warrior and commander of a ship called the Black Wind, and a lot of
her scenes involve battles at sea.
Whelan was filming a scene near Belfast, Northern Ireland, for the seventh season of Game of
Thrones when she sustained some kind of injury requiring hospitalization.
On September 14, 2016, Whelan posted to her Instagram account a photo of some old-fashioned,
hospital-issue underwear.
The pic came with a wry caption from Whelan, describing how a ward nurse offered her the
undergarments because she arrived at the hospital, quote, "a bit suddenly and unprepared."
Whelan never confirmed exactly what happened to her on set or how, but she soon rejoined
the series.
Eight seasons of Game of Thrones built up to "The Long Night," the episode featuring
the Battle of Winterfell, the apocalyptic confrontation between a massive army of zombie-like
White Walkers controlled by the Night King and the assorted, united human contingents
of Westeros taking a break from fighting one another.
It's one of the largest sequences ever filmed for Game of Thrones, which made for an intense,
grueling shoot.
"We're fighting death!
I can't beat death."
In March 2019, Entertainment Weekly reported that one of the series' regular actresses
suddenly collapsed on set while filming a scene that involved what the outlet described
as "a lot of standing still."
A crew member noticed the fall right away and called out for a medic, who promptly tended
to the unnamed actress.
The official line: the actress fainted, went home, and returned to the set the following
day.
Part of what makes Game of Thrones so thrilling is the scenery.
The series has shot in exotic locations all around the world, and filmed many sequences
in the breathtaking, rocky wilds of Northern Ireland, which stood in nicely for the hinterlands
of the Seven Kingdoms and beyond.
While it looks great on screen, the area posed its own unique challenges for the production,
particularly the elements.
The weather can get awfully brutal just off the sea in the northern United Kingdom.
While shooting near the village of Ballintoy in 2011, the crew erected a pole tent where
workers and extras could have lunch.
Then winds from Hurricane Katia whipped through the area and tore the whole thing down, according
to the Belfast Telegraph.
In the chaos, four men and one woman sustained minor injuries, enough to briefly land them
in the hospital.
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