How Game of Thrones pulled off that gruesome death scene

SPOILER ALERT. This week’s epic Game of Thrones episode gave us yet another horrific death scene. It looked sickeningly real. This is how they pulled it off.

Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon) discovers the hard way his hounds are not as loyal as he thought. Picture: HBO

WARNING: This article contains spoilers from the Game of Thrones episode Battle of the Bastards.

It seems fitting that the one prop Iwan Rheon took with him when he left Game of Thrones was a paring knife — the one Ramsay Bolton used earlier this season to kill Osha (Natalia Tena).

Bolton will go down in TV history as one of the most hated characters, and one of the most violent.

He raped his wife, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) and castrated Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen).

His own end was appropriately gruesome and painful.

After losing the Battle of the Bastards to Jon Snow (Kit Harington), he was beat nearly to a pulp, tied to a chair and fed to his own ravenous hounds.

Rheon knew he would meet this ignominious end at the beginning of the season, but executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss assured him, “‘There are not going to be any dogs near you. Don’t worry,’” Rheon tells The Post.

The challenge for director Miguel Sapochnik was to bring actor and canine together in a way that looked sickeningly real on screen, even though the two species never had any contact.

The dog, named Odin, for example, was filmed separately on a green-screen stage “biting a football covered in barbecue sauce or some savory snack,” Sapochnik says.

From the looks of it there was no shortage of deaths in this episode.

“That particular dog was never in the same room as Iwan. It was just too dangerous.”

For his part, Rheon had to act that rare emotion — what it felt like to be eaten alive by an animal.

“I just imagined it,” he says.

“I’ve seen the dogs and I know what they’re like. It helped my imagination.”

Bolton’s death leaves Game of Thrones with a dearth of villains, but Rheon thinks there’s at least one man who could fill his shoes — Euron Greyjoy (Pilou Asbaek), the cruel sourpuss from the Iron Islands.

“I think he’s got the potential to be a good antagonist,” he says.

“And you’ve got Littlefinger (Aidan Gillen) kicking about. And you’ve got the White Walkers as well.”

The day after the episode aired back home in England, Rheon says fans, who knew of his work before Game of Thrones, wished him well.

“They said, ‘We’re glad Ramsay’s gone, but we’ll miss you,’” he says.

“Kind of makes you feel warm inside.”

This article was originally published on the New York Post