Nikolaj Coster-Waldau looks back at some of the more interesting moments for him in Game of Thrones.

The most revealing thing I learned is that there were three versions of the scene where Bran finds Jaime and Cersei having sex in a tower at Winterfell in Season 1.

According to Nikolaj, the versions varied primarily in the degree of nudity involved. Rather atypically for GoT, the least naked version was chosen for the episode.

A species of dinosaur has been named after a GoT dragon.

Scientists have unearthed the fossil of a new species of dinosaur in northern Patagonia, Argentina. The dinosaur, named Meraxes gigas, was a giant, carnivorous dinosaur with short arms, like the well-known Tyrannosaurus rex.

The dinosaur is a member of the Carcharodontosauridae family, one of at least four of the big predator theropods who evolved – separately – disproportionally small forelimbs. The skeleton found was about 11 metres long, and weighed more than four tons.

To support that weight, the carnivorous Meraxes gigas must have lived in an area with a lot of edible creatures.

"Meraxes was a top predator at its time," said Juan Canale, the project lead at Ernesto Bachmann Paleontological Museum. "They were carnivorous dinosaurs, and they fed on herbivorous dinosaurs, likely titanosaurs and rebbachisaurids."

The dinosaur found by Canale and team was around 45 years old, a fully grown adult.

These creatures had long lifespans – somewhat like dragons.

The species name was chosen by the researchers. It is called 'Meraxes', after a dragon from the George RR Martin book series that inspired Game Of Thrones, and 'gigas', which is Greek for giant, due to its large size.

Meraxes was the name of Rhaenys Targaryen‘s mount. She was one of the two sister-wives of Aegon the Conqueror. Both Rhaenys and Meraxes died about a hundred years before the start of the action in House of the Dragon. So no relevant spoilers for the upcoming prequel.

Casting news about Dunk & Egg.

Peter Claffey (Bad Sisters) and Dexter Sol Ansell (The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) have landed the two lead roles in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight, the next Thrones spinoff series to follow House of the Dragon, Entertainment Weekly can exclusively report. The prequel is based on author George R.R. Martin's Tales of Dunk and Egg novellas and is set about a century before the events of Game of Thrones. Claffey will star as "Dunk," a.k.a. Ser Duncan the Tall, a young, naïve, and courageous knight; and Ansell will star as "Egg," the nickname for Duncan's diminutive squire. [ ... ] Claffey, a former Connacht Rugby player in Ireland, made his stage debut at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in A Whistle in the Dark by Tom Murphy. He was seen in 2022's Bad Sisters and Wreck, and he's set to star opposite Cillian Murphy in Small Things Like These and to appear in season 3 of Vikings: Valhalla. Ansell, now 9 years old, started his acting career at the age of 4 on ITV's 2019 show Emmerdale. His credits include Sky's thriller series The Midwich Cuckoos and Netflix's comedy film Christmas on Mistletoe Farm, but he more recently portrayed a younger Coriolanus Snow in last year's The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes. Ansell also has roles lined up in The Moor, Channel 4's Hullraisers, and Robin and The Hood.

I think that Art Parkinson was just 9 when he was chosen to portray Rickon Stark. Though Rickon was not really that major a character throughout GoT.

As one of the title characters, Dexter Sol Ansell will probably be in every episode. So I'm wondering if this will be an ASoIaF equivalent of a kids program.

A question for our Portuguese-speaking friends. / Uma pergunta para os nossos amigos lusófonos.

All discussion and recommendations regarding this are welcome!

🇵🇹🇧🇷🇦🇴🇲🇿🇨🇻🇸🇹🇹🇱🇬🇶🇬🇼🇲🇴

George R.R. Martin confirms that a Jon Snow sequel is in the early stages of development.

From Not a Blog. 

Yes, there is a Jon Snow show in development. The HOLLYWOOD REPORTER story was largely correct. And I would expect no less from James Hibberd. I have dealt with a lot of reporters over the past few years, and Hibberd is one of the very best, an actual journalist who does all the things journalists are supposed to do (getting the facts right, talking to sources, respecting requests for "background only" and "off the record," etc) that most of the clickbait sites never bother with.

Our working title for the show is SNOW.

[ ... ]

There’s not much more I can tell you, not until HBO gives me a green light.

It seems as though Emilia Clarke has already mentioned that SNOW was Kit’s idea in a recent interview. So that part is out. Yes, it was Kit Harrington who brought the idea to us.

It’s useful to remember that HBO spent a small fortune on developing a series about the Age of Heroes in The North before dropping the project. So SNOW is not a done deal.

GRRM also mentioned the W-book in that long post. 🙂

Yes, WINDS OF WINTER. No, have not forgotten. I was back with Tyrion this past week.

Nathalie Emmanuel   b. 02 March 1989 Southend-on-Sea, Essex, UK

@culturecrave at Twitter quoting Jonah Hill from an interview at W Magazine. Jonah only started watching GoT relatively recently. Here’s more of what he said in the interview.

I had never seen Game of Thrones. Never seen an episode. I started in the past couple of months. I’m on season 4.

[ ... ]

Game of Thrones is so sick. I know this is hilarious, because I'm in 2012. I'm just watching three episodes at a time, like you would binge any show. But I forget this happened in real time and was like a cultural event. So I watched the Red Wedding, as one of three episodes I watched that night. I'm calling friends, like, “Oh my god, Robb Stark got killed, blah, blah, blah.” And they're like, “Yeah, dude. It was like the end-of-Sopranos-level cultural event.”

Hey Jonah – when you finish Season 4, contact us and we’ll assemble direct links to the feature we did after every episode through the finale beginning with S04E10.

EDIT: If Jonah is “on Season 4″, he’s actually in 2014 – not 2012. 😉

Twitter user Liam Bones reminding us of one of actor James Faulkner’s earlier roles. Herod Agrippa to Randyll Tarly is quite a range.

I don’t know if George R.R. Martin had any influence on that bit of casting, but it’s true that he’s been a big fan of the mid-1970s BBC series I, Claudius for decades.

Just over a year ago he wrote glowingly about I, Claudius in his non-blog.

If you have great writing and great acting, that is really all you need. And I, CLAUDIUS had that in spades. A single writer, Jack Pulman, scripted all thirteen episodes.  

[ ... ]

If you have never seen I, CLAUDIUS, you owe it to yourself to have a look (though be warned, this a dark show, and there is lots of violence and sex, especially by the standards of 1976). You should read the novels too, they are terrific.  And then give thanks you do not live in ancient Rome.

Even now, deep in the Second Golden Age of television, I would rank I, CLAUDIUS as one of the greatest television series ever made. Certainly in the top ten. Probably in the top five.

I’ve seen I, Claudius and can second GRRM’s praise.

While the special effects budget for this series was way low, they certainly did not skimp when it came to acting. In addition to Faulkner, the cast included these actors: Derek Jacobi, Siân Phillips, John Hurt, George Baker, Margaret Tyzack, Brian Blessed, and Patrick Stewart. Yes, Capt. Picard was a bad guy in ancient Rome over a decade before he took command of the Enterprise. 

If you like Game of Thrones you will probably also enjoy I, Claudius. It’s based on brilliantly written (historical) novels, focuses on a struggle for power and influence, has a number of unexpected twists, and as GRRM indicated, it has its share of sex and violence – within the bounds of 1970s television.

I’m so tired of hearing that ANYTHING is the next Game of Thrones.

Whenever some new TV fantasy or medieval drama happens along, some critic looking for clickbait will write a headline proclaiming that show to be the next GoT.

In fact, GoT succeeded because it had unusual originality. If another show actually tried to be too much like GoT then it would just be seen as a knockoff and won’t be as successful. Of course I’m not talking about curated prequels or sequels to the original. 😉

I’ve not seen The Wheel of Time because it hasn’t started yet. It may be as good as many people say it is. But it won’t be GoT.

GoT gave fantasy a high profile which lasted most of the previous decade. But it certainly wasn’t the first fantasy adaptation of a series of novels. Yet I don’t recall many people saying that GoT was the next Lord of the Rings. Just because something is an epic fantasy doesn’t make it the next (fill in the blank with title of previous epic fantasy).

GoT was very political. That gave it an appeal that transcended fantasy. There have probably been more than a few academic papers written about the political wisdom of Tyrion, Varys, Cersei, Tywin, and Baelish.

Game of Thrones allowed its audience to consider the ways power corrupts people, ideas of loyalty, and the inherent conflict of love and duty. Pitting a slew of morally gray, complicated characters against each other in an increasingly complicated political arena made for a one-of-a-kind viewing experience. The series provided the same kind of thrill as following a political news cycle, without the bummer inherent in knowing politics affect your actual life.

The characters were more Shakespearean (and even more Machiavellian) than Tolkienesque. While it was fantasy, it also had an unusual twist.

Every new series (or film) deserves to be experienced without preconceptions.

Viewers should consume The Wheel of Time series on its own terms and accept it for what it is, rather than expect it to be any kind of Game of Thrones imitation.

^^^ From a feature at BuzzFeed called 25 "Universally Hated" Characters That Honestly Deserve More Respect.

I have serious doubts about giving Joffrey more respect — he was vile to the very end. But I will say that Irish actor Jack Gleeson deserves heaps of praise for his superb portrayal of the inbred brat.

Some history of the House Baratheon.

Listening to that reminded me what a fantastic voice Mark Addy (Robert Baratheon) has for such narrations.

I can’t say I’m sold on the Myers-Briggs way of dividing humanity into personality subsets. Though it’s probably more accurate than horoscopes.

But this particular graphic does shed some light on different types of leadership styles.

An odd omission is Tywin Lannister. He kind of slipped up near the end of Season 4, but up to that time he was probably the most successful leader in the series.

Though it’s possible they included only characters who were still alive at the start of Season 7. They would have had to make up an entirely new description for Robert Baratheon – THE SLACKER LEADER.

EDIT: If you have difficulty seeing the graphic, view it at the blog version.

Why Lady Stoneheart wasn’t in the HBO series.

The three reasons given in the article are valid ones. But it seems that George R.R. Martin wasn’t terribly clear about where Lady Stoneheart was headed when the showrunners were working on the script for Season 3 which included the Red Wedding. If Catelyn Stark were resurrected that would have taken some of the drama away from Jon Snow being resurrected by Melisandre. Apparently you can only have so many resurrections. 😛

We can’t be sure where GRRM is going with Lady Stoneheart in The Winds of Winter. But it’s probable that bits of her storyline had been outsourced to various other characters in the HBO series.

Catelyn Stark/Lady Stoneheart obviously has a bone to pick with Walder Frey. So it’s possible that Lady Stoneheart gets to be the person who kills Frey in the books. But as an Arya fan, it would be difficult to imagine a more satisfying end to the House Frey than how Arya did it. The North Remembers.

Learn from Cersei Lannister. Be careful what you ask for.

While usually around to some degree, religious fervor in Game of Thrones probably reached its peak in Season 5. That’s when the Sparrows took over King’s Landing and Stannis based his ill-fated decisions on Melisandre’s interpretation of the dictates of R'hllor, the Lord of Light. Although I don’t consider her to be a religious fanatic, it was also the season that Arya became a novice at the House of Black and White which is a temple to the Many-Faced God,

After Season 1, George R.R. Martin expressed his own views on religion at Entertainment Weekly. While a religious skeptic, he’s fascinated by the concept.

You would consider me an atheist or agnostic. I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe this isn’t the end and there’s something more, but I can’t convince the rational part of me that that makes any sense whatsoever.

[ ... ]

And as for the gods, I’ve never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain? I was taught pain is to let us know when our body is breaking down. Well, why couldn’t we have a light? Like a dashboard light?

The nickname ‘Kingslayer’ was specific to Jaime Lannister though he was certainly not the only character who slew a king in the series.

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