Inside 'Game of Thrones' Season 6: Readying the Characters for Battle
Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Cersei (Lena Headey) Lannister in ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 6
Towards the end of the first season of Game of Thrones, back in 2011, a note came through to the costume department from HBO execs.
“I was in trouble,” says costume designer Caroline Hill, “because the costumes were too clean. Studio complained.”
Not many shows get down and dirty like Game of Thrones. Much of the series takes place outdoors, on horseback, soaked in blood and rain, next to sooty hearths or in dank dungeons. Life in medieval Westeros would have been a soiled, stinky mess.
And so these days, at Game of Thrones’ HQ in Belfast, Northern Ireland, there is a department called “Breakdown.” Between the armory where they make the real plate and chainmail, not far from the sewing room where all of the regalia is crafted by hand, but just before the marquee where every one of the 6,000 extras is fitted, there is a department dedicated to making things look worse.
“Everything goes for breakdown. Even the beautiful dresses for the nobles,” says Hill, as we walk past Lena Headey’s delicate penance robe from last year, encrusted with tiny stars and just enough mud. “They didn’t have dry cleaners then.”
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In the breakdown room, seven people are charged with making everything look impeccably blemished. When Yahoo TV visits, they are gathered 'round a table, dry brushing in texture and artfully slashing pants. On the walls are shelves of light reactive dyes and “antiquing fluid.” One breakdown artist is adding a frosting of spray-on snow to a battered shirt. She herself wears a T-shirt with, “You Know Shite All Jon Snow” on the back, upgrading one of the series’ best-known catchphrases with a dash of the local Irish vernacular.
Revisit Season 1′s costumes
The problem with breakdown, as Hill concedes as we walk through to the tent containing the racks and racks of extras’ costumes, is that you can’t come in at the end of a good days’ battling and throw your blood-and-mud spattered cloak in the wash.
“We have to preserve the breakdown. We have to preserve the dirt,” she says. Which means that, yes… “We don’t wash the costumes, per se.”
Given that this year Thrones has shot everywhere from the dry heat of Girona, Spain, to the boglands of Northern Ireland, those costumes have taken a battering. As a result, the extras tent, complete with piles of helmets, tabards, and pelts, has the distinctive odor of wet dog.
“The Game of Thrones extras are the best extras I’ve ever worked with,” says Hill, who when we meet is preparing costumes for a scene the next day which will use 300 supporting artists. “They come back year in, year out and they are extremely loyal: if they are a Lannister, they stay a Lannister. They won’t be a Stark!” she says. “The conditions we have to put them through: Rain, snow, cold… they put plastic bags on their feet to stay dry. They all have their own T-shirts and leggings underneath — that gets washed. If it’s been raining all day, we have a ‘dry’ team who come in every night, spray the costumes with alcohol and dry them out. Ninety percent of the time, it’s dry the next day.”
Which means 10% of the time, the extras are wearing wet clothes. It can’t be pleasant to work wearing what is essentially a musty, sodden wrap. But Owen Teale, who plays Ser Alliser Thorne, says that the costumes set the right mood.
Ser Alliser Thorne (Owen Teale) in Season 4
“That set in Northern Ireland, Castle Black, it’s in a quarry. And it f–king rains and rains. Once you’re in the quarry, you can’t get to your comforts as an actor — to the caravans, to the food wagon… they just keep you in there,” he says. “When it rains, it takes two people to put the cloak on me. It’s an enormous thing, strapped on, and once it gets wet, it probably weighs my own weight again, which is about 15 stone. So it’s a bleak, horrible situation, often standing up to my ankles in water. But it helps me go to the right place for Ser Alliser. This is what the world of the show is like: I [look at] everyone on set and think, ‘Lucky you… you bastards.’”
Teale, of course, was the man who killed Jon Snow — and thus set in motion one of the most pendulous cliffhangers in TV history. On our visit to Belfast late last year, there was, not surprisingly, a general omerta among the crew about Snow’s demise or otherwise. Still, I couldn’t help but scour for clues.
Samwell Tarly (John Bradley) and Gilly (Hannah Murray) in Season 6
In the armor department, there are sketches on the wall of the Tarly family — we know that Sam and Gilly will visit Horn Hill, the family seat, this year. Next to them is a sketch, unnamed, of someone who looks distinctly like Kit Harington — or at least he has his haircut. In the armory, where every single weapon is forged from scratch, Snow’s sword, Longclaw, is lying on a table… but then so is every signature weapon from all five seasons. Already the talk is of the show’s legacy, and items like the White Walkers’ ice swords and the castration knife deployed on Alfie Allen’s Theon Greyjoy in Season 3 are being displayed in exhibitions around the world.
Jon Snow (Kit Harington) in Season 3
Other than that, there’s not a sniff of Snow in the building. But there is snow. Because this season, winter isn’t just coming, it’s come, which means that the flecks of paper they use as snow, showered down via windfan by the ton, are everywhere — not least on the costumes. That snow brings problems of its own. “You don’t want to get it wet,” Hill says. “It turns in to porridge and it’s sticky and messy. And if you do get it on your clothes, you don’t want to put them in the laundry.”
Revisit Season 4′s costumes
There is, it has to be said, a certain irony to visiting the Game of Thrones costume department at all — it’s a series that’s renowned for its lack of costumes, at least among its female characters. Writer and producer Bryan Cogman insists that there isn’t a quota: “It feels right for the scene or it doesn’t. Nudity is certainly an element of those [sex] scenes, but it’s not like we sit and think, ‘Oh, we haven’t had any breasts for two episodes.’ The story is just told as it’s told,” he says. “Whether it’s the graphic violence, whether you have a scene where a head comes off on screen or it’s a cutaway, it’s what feels organic to the scene.”
Nonetheless, bodies do dismember with disconcerting regularity on the show, and if you look really carefully at some of the sets you can just see some residue from six years of grievous bodily harm.
The Sept of Baelor in Season 5
“It’s a problem,” says Head of Construction Tom Martin as he shows off the Sept of Baelor, one of several gargantuan, 360-degree sets he’s built. “We use real stone floors and the bloods we use won’t wipe off. If it’s someone’s head hitting a wall, then we’ll have to remove a complete section and replace it with a really soft foam so the person’s head can go right in to it safely. Then you have another section that will wipe off and you do the melon trick, where you hit [a melon filled with blood] and do the blood splatter. So you end up with three different set pieces just to achieve one effect.”
Bran (Isaac Hempstead Wright) in Season 6
Back in the armor room, final touches are being made by a team to four suits of intricate grey leatherwork that adorn the The Night’s King — the leader of the undead who last season brought an entire slain army back to life with an insouciant wave and a sly smile.
We know from one of HBO’s pre-season trailers that this year he will come face to face with Bran Stark, played by a returning Isaac Hempstead Wright:
“We had a lot of zombified extras in one scene,” Hempstead Wright tells me later, “and there I am walking through them all with them swaying in the wind slightly and their flesh hanging off. I turn ‘round, and there’s The Night’s King. It’s our stunt guy! He’s a really sweet, funny bloke. You’re sitting there chatting with him and he’s got this kind of Darth Maul head on. They put in these extraordinary contact lenses, which have this almost hexagonal yellow shape in them — so it’s pretty spooky when you’re just having a coffee with him.”
Cersei in Season 6
Next door, in the sewing room, a 17-strong staff is making an all-black dress for Headey. I assume this is for Cersei mourning the death of her daughter Myrcella at the end of last season, poisoned by Ellaria Sand (Indira Varma).
One room over, some adjustments are being made to the armor of Gregor Clegane, aka The Mountain. The armorer is Giampaolo Grassi, who has made real armor for the Swiss Guard, the oldest army in the world. “For films, real life, or this show,” he says, “the techniques are the same.” He gets back to his work: “I am busy. We are talking about hundreds of new suits of armor for this season.“
Red Viper (Pedro Pascal) vs. The Mountain (Gregor Clegane) in Season 4
It’s the sheer volume of costumes and suits of armor, set against the detail that goes in to every one, that’s so striking — Game of Thrones is TV as industrial process. Cogman has already teased that this year on Game of Thrones, we will see a battle scene like none before.
“It’s definitely the biggest [action sequence yet],” he told Entertainment Weekly. “We’ve always wanted to get to a place — story-wise and budget-wise and time-wise and resource-wise — where we would be able to do a proper battle, with one army on one side, one army on another side.”
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Well, those armies need clothing and they need armor. But they also need weapons, which is why our final stop, in Game of Thrones’ “Armory,” a shack just behind the soundstages, feels like a factory preparing for war.
In the corner of the room as you enter, there is a booth with an archery target inside, peppered with holes.
“That’s where the extras come for training,” says Stephen Murphy, the armory blacksmith. “We’re not going to give them a bow until they know how to use it.”
Murphy is one of the men charged with forging each and every one of the weapons. His favorite? Those White Walker ice swords, which are made from fiberglass. They’re supposed to be just about indestructible in the show, but they’re not the weapon that Murphy would take in to battle.
“Best weapon for actually killing someone? I would go with a decent axe. You can shatter a sword blade with it; you can use it to take down shields. Axes are good for breaking and crushing bones and going through armor,” he says. “There’s going to be a lot of that this season.”
Season 6 of Game of Thrones premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.
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