One of the new Season 6 directors is in Game of Thrones news today. The Hollywood Reporter has an interview with Jack Bender who will be directing two episodes in the coming season. According to the director,
He hasn’t received any scripts yet, but he did get an outline for the season while season five was still airing. He says the writers have “about six or seven scripts written” for season six so far.
More after the jump!Continue reading →
Yesterday we shared with you the first part of a huge new round table discussion, centered around Game of Thrones season 5. The writers of three websites gathered to talk (okay, argue might be a better word) about the most recent season of the show, and words were exchanged…many, many words, which the very able Marc Kleinhenz was forced to split into 3 parts.
If you missed part I, dive into the fray with yesterday’s post here at Watchers on the Wall.
If you’re all caught up, then please head on over to Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire for Part II of the round table.
Part II features a good many more comments from the writers of Watchers on the Wall, who are a bit more show-friendly than some of our friends at other websites.
Part III will be shared tomorrow at Tower of the Hand, so be sure to swing over there Tuesday.
Enjoy!
Nearly five months ago, we asked a simple enough question: what if Game of Thrones’s fifth season sucks? It seems only natural, now that season five has come and gone, to attempt to answer that question – and it seems only right to once again invite along the kindly folks from Tower of the Hand, who helped us kick off the great debate (and bar room brawl) that originally ensued.
It turns out, however, that wrestling with inquiries of quality, controversy, and definitiveness is so huge and so overwhelming, we needed to ask along a few extra voices to help us sort through everything and discern what’s what. That’s where the uber-nerds of Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire come in.
Yes, that’s right – we’re now a three-site inter-roundtable. It’s an epic discussion for the ages.
Except that “discussion” is actually less appropriate than “argument”; yes, it turns out that Game of Thrones viewers and Song of Ice and Fire readers tend to be impassioned, hard-headed, and verbose fans who aren’t afraid to crack a few heads in order to make a point. Who knew? (And who knew there were so many raw nerves to expose along the way?)
Responses in our 17,000-word(!) roundtable ranged from “It was so bad, I stopped watching early in the season” to “The show is still adapting the books, but the training wheels are now off.” That’s quite the gamut, and exploring it from one end to the other took a lot of time – so much, in fact, that we had to divide this up into three parts. Below is the first, with the second appearing tomorrow over at Wars and Politics of Ice and Fire, and the finale showing up at Tower of the Hand on Tuesday (we promise the debate only intensifies with each subsequent chapter).
Have your compasses out? Good – it’s time to navigate the minefield.
Stannis remains stubborn.
Has an episode description ever captured the entirety of a character as perfectly as it did in the synopsis for episode 7 of Game of Thrones season 5? The simple statement, typically vague to elude spoiler hunters, wound up encapsulating Stannis Baratheon hilariously well as fans noted. There is no one in the Game of Thrones or Ice and Fire world more stubborn than he is, and it’s that fierce hold to his resolutions that ultimately led to the death of Stannis in the season finale.
With the death of Stannis, we also lose one of the best actors on Game of Thrones, Stephen Dillane.
Game of Thrones has a new costume designer on board: the award-winning April Ferry. She is well-known for her work on a number of films, including Jurassic World, Donnie Darko and Robocop, as well as television series such as Extant and Rome, for which she won an Emmy. In a statement to the The Hollywood Reporter, show-runners David Benioff and Dan Weiss said:
There is so much left to do on the costume front, so many changes left for the characters and ground for them to cover, and we’re so grateful to have someone as brilliant as April on board to create the costumes that tell the story’s final chapters.
An audition for Game of Thrones season 6 has surfaced online on Vimeo (and since been taken down), with an actress trying out for the role of the beautiful priestess mentioned in the casting breakdowns. We do believe these are real audition sides on the video, with dialogue that could well be a part of season 6, much like how the Sand Snakes’s leaked audition scripts last year turned out to all be a part of the show.
Spoilers, of course!
In the video, English actress Tehmina Sunny read a scene in which the red priestess, apparently named Kinvara, visits with Tyrion and Varys in Meereen.
In the novels, the head of the Red Temple of Volantis is a man named Benerro. It’s possible this priestess is a show equivalent of that character. Tyrion and Varys appear to be seeking her approval and support of Daenerys.
WotW reader Jared has transcribed the video:
There is only one god, as they say, and his name is Death. And this Season Finale, he took two very different ladies with him, Myranda, and Myrcella Baratheon. Continue reading →
The end of a Game of Thrones season is also the time to look back at the show ratings and at some pretty graphs. Well, the latter is quite subjective. Anyway, here goes – comparative initial viewership of HBO shows across their first five seasons (where available):
As always, season runs longer (or shorter) than 10 episodes have been scaled for the ease of comparison. Click to enlarge.
First things first: a new record was set by the season finale. For the first time since S2, the final episode drew the most immediate interest. The high-water mark now stands at 8.11 million. This also means that Thrones has passed anoher million mark (the season premiere already came terribly close to that).
It hasn’t even been a week since season 5 ended, and there is already more casting news about Game of Thrones season 6.
A reliable source has informed us of a series of castings underway at the moment. Most interestingly, the showrunners are specifically looking for either Irish or Northern Irish residents to fill these roles.
All we have are character names and titles at the moment, but we will update this information as soon as we can. Some of these names give an inkling as to where the characters will be based, and which members of the main cast they may be interacting with. The names/titles are as follows:
UPDATE: We now have the role descriptions, with a couple character additions!
![776466_510_promo_frames_11_00153969[1]](http://watchersonthewall.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/776466_510_promo_frames_11_001539691.jpg)
We’ve known since last October that Lena Headey would be using a body double for the nude scenes required by Cersei’s painful walk of atonement, after a WatchersOnTheWall source shared a Game of Thrones set report. Now in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, for the first time we learn about the filming of the walk from the point of view of the double, British-American actress Rebecca van Cleave.
The EW article confirms our initial set report that the body double was nude, while Headey wore a beige dress as she performed Cersei’s Walk.
The show’s star also compliments van Cleave’s performance, as a double does far more than simply stand-in as a lookalike body part.