The crew on Game of Thrones is going above and beyond to bring fans an epic, spoiler-free final season. The show is reportedly shooting multiple decoy endings and giving actors earpieces instead of scripts for their lines. Now it looks like there’s another reason we won’t get any new episodes until 2019: The show spent a whopping 55 days shooting a single battle scene, Watchers on the Wall reports.
According to the GoT fan site, assistant director Jonathan Quinlan let the info slip in a since-deleted post on Instagram. He shared a photo of a thank you note from “The Producer Types”—presumably David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and company—in which they tipped their hats to the cast and crew “for enduring 55 straight nights” of taping for just one presumably devastating battle scene.
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“When tens of millions of people around the world watch this episode a year from now, they won’t know how hard you worked,” the note reads. “They won’t care how tired you were or how tough it was to do your job in sub-freezing temperatures. They’ll just understand that they’re watching something that’s never been done before.”
According to Indiewire, the only scene that rivals the season eight battle came in season six’s bloody “Battle of the Bastards,” which was shot over 25 days—nothing compared to the roughly two months the recent shoot reportedly took. And as Quinlan tells it, all that time the crew put in was worth it.
“You’ll never again see anything like it,” he wrote on Instagram.
It’s not clear exactly what (or who) is going down in the colossal brawl, but it’s presumably the reason most of the cast cried their eyes out after the final table read. We’re just happy no one had to call the fire department this time around.
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