UPDATE: HBO Apologizes For Severed George W. Bush Head On ‘Game Of Thrones’
UPDATE 8:30 PM: The controversy over the use of a prosthetic George W. Bush head as a prop in beheading scenes on the hit HBO fantasy series Game Of Thrones led to both HBO and the series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss issuing apologies tonight, following criticism by Republican leaders. It is unclear whether the image would be edited out of future GOT rebroadcasts on HBO and on-demand but that appears likely.
HBO: We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss: We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.
In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.
PREVIOUS 5:30 PM: In a classic case of “What were they thinking?!,” scenes from the first season of HBO’s fantasy series Game Of Thrones featured the decapitated head of former President George W. Bush. The inappropriate prop use would’ve likely gone unnoticed if not for the series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who drew attention to it on the Game Of Thrones Season One DVD boxed set when commenting on a scene from Episode 10 where the Bush head in a filthy long wig and covered with mud is one of several positioned on spikes when King Joffrey (Jack Gleason) takes Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) to show her the severed head of her father. “The last head on the left is George Bush,” the two say. “George Bush’s head appears in a couple of beheading scenes. It’s not a choice, it’s not a political statement. We just had to use whatever heads we had lying around…”
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