Game of thrones: Game theories

When the new season of Game of Thrones roars back on to our screens an epic cocktail of sex, politics and violence is virtually guaranteed.

Sophie Turner and Aidan Gillen as Sansa Stark and Lord Petyr Baelish.

When the Queen visited the Game of Thrones set in Northern Ireland last year she paused for a photo next to the Iron Throne, the series’ centrepiece. She did not sit in it. It was a shrewd piece of royal image management: in the show, a savage medieval fantasy that begins its fifth series on Foxtel’s Showcase on Monday, everyone wants to claim the throne but those who get there tend not to last long. The most recent occupant, Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), was poisoned at his wedding in the fourth series. Predecessor Robert Baratheon was killed by a boar in a plot ordered by his wife (who had been having an affair with her brother, Joffrey’s real father). No monarch would want to be associated with those kinds of goings on.

Yet the Queen was happy to be associated with the show, and you can see why: Game of Thrones, made for HBO in the US and shown on Showcase in Australia, is arguably the biggest television show in the world. Based on a series of bestselling fantasy books by American author George RR Martin, and adapted by David Benioff and DB Weiss, it tells the story of a rolling civil war in the fictional lands of Westeros and Essos, contested by houses noble (the Starks), unscrupulous (the Lannisters), exiled (the Targaryens) and Stannis Baratheon. The throne sits in King’s Landing, the capital of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. North of Westeros there is a greater existential threat looming in the forms of an unyielding winter and incursions into the civilised world from Wildlings, the collective Westerosi term for anyone from north of the Wall (a 700ft-tall ice structure that serves as the bulwark between the known world and terra incognita). White Walkers, a group of spectral warriors who have been stealing babies, are far more fearsome. Only the Night’s Watch, a military order sworn to protect the Wall from their base at Castle Black, stands in the way of impending annihilation. And did we mention the dragons?

When Game of Thrones originally aired in 2011 it was criticised for its graphic violence and nudity. But during the course of 40 episodes it has also won widespread critical acclaim for its storytelling and its creation of a convincing netherworld. Not only does the show attract huge viewing figures but it stirs up a particular type of obsessive fandom: for a key fight scene, filmed in Osuna in Spain for the forthcoming series, the producers thought it might be nice to ask a few hundred of those fans to be extras. They had 86,000 applications from all over the world. Lena Headey, who plays Cersei Lannister, the embittered wife of the former king and the mother of the most recent one, sums it up succinctly: “It is … a beast.”

The lair of the beast is a series of cavernous warehouses in the Titanic Quarter of Belfast. When you go there it is hard to think of the production as anything other than a major military campaign. The money, the statistics and the manpower involved all point to a vast operation: a reported budget of $100 million a series; thousands of extras; 300 shooting crew; more than 700 workers involved in the production as a whole at any one time in and around Belfast.

Unusually for a TV show the sets for Game of Thrones stay up all year round, which is one reason the series has come to feel like a roving city-state within Northern Ireland. The series commands 60,000sq m of stage space in Belfast alone. Away from the Titanic Quarter there are permanent sets dotted around the country like miniature theme parks — at a former quarry in Maghera­­morne, County Antrim, you will find the Castle Black set, a distant outpost with the entire bluff behind it painted white for the ice of the Wall. The Game of Thrones crew has built a fishing village there called Hardhome, a new loc­ation for series five. It feels as if it has been there for generations.

If you want to create a new world you need more than one country, more than one topography and climate — Game of Thrones films right across Europe: in Dubrovnik, Seville and Osuna. Previously it has been shot in Iceland, Malta and Morocco. Locations are expensive; to make the most of their time in each locale, two units film continuously between July and December; effectively Game of Thrones is two series being made at the same time. Sometimes three or four directors will be filming different episodes in a single location on a single day. The logistics are mind-boggling, the sets vast. But it is the accoutrements that are most striking when you see them. At one point I find myself taking a note while leaning on what I thought was a scaffolding rig in a corridor. That, someone tells me, was the leg of a woolly mammoth (before computer graphics were added) from last year’s climactic battle of Castle Black, the Wildlings’ attempt to storm the Wall.

They are making weapons here on an industrial scale. Game of Thrones has its own on-site arsenal, to make the 10,000-plus weapons used to date. “Swords, shields, spears, bows, crossbows,” says resident blacksmith Stephen Murphy. “I’m the armoury blacksmith so I do any of the forging they need to do. This was one of my creations,” he says, holding up a bone-handled “castration knife” used for that purpose in season three. “I was told to make it as unpleasant at possible.” You could say Game of Thrones has turned unpleasantness into art.

Game of Thrones also is renowned for sex and nudity. It is one of the show’s ironies that beautiful clothes are designed for the women — the wedding dress of Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), Joffrey’s intended, took more than 200 hours to make — who spend much of the time on camera not wearing them.

Violence, sex … and death: the triple pillars of Game of Thrones. The show’s trump card is that you never quite know which of the three you are going to get. The show really set out its stall at the end of the first series, when the man who should have been on the throne, the righteous, likable Northerner Ned Stark (Sean Bean), was summarily beheaded. From that point onwards Game of Thrones has been famed for its brutal, unforeseen killings.

An episode in series three called The Red Wedding killed off a third of the show’s most popular characters (the good guys, mostly) in less than 30 seconds. Shock value is vital in a series that aims to run for seven, possibly more, years — and every actor takes it as read that their next episode could be their last.

The writers have been known to play on this unease. Kit Harington (who plays Jon Snow, Ned Stark’s bastard son and the hero of the Night’s Watch) and Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy, a ward of Stark who, brutalised by torture, is now a eunuch) have been given fake scripts detailing their character’s demise. “I honestly thought, “What a great way to go,” Allen says, a few months later. “I went on holiday to Ibiza. They didn’t tell me for three weeks that they were joking. You’re always a little bit worried that you’re going to be knocked off.”

Maisie Williams, who plays Ned Stark’s young daughter Arya, the tomboy whose exposure to the cruelty of men has turned her into a steely assassin, says the actors are caught between wanting to tell a good story and hoping to still have a job. Arya is not going to die, at least not yet — the day I visit she is on set filming.

The Game of Thrones fan base is obsessively keen on finding out what is coming up. The strange thing is that as much as everything is confidential, the Game of Thrones books were already massive sellers before the TV adaptation was thought of. So this series that is so reliant on surprise is also one where millions of people already know what is going to happen. They know, for example, that in this series Arya heads to Braavos, a seaport in Essos, and specifically to the House of Black and White, a sort of ethereal convent. I can tell you, however, a little of what I see being filmed on the day of my visit.

The set itself is almost pitch black. Williams, who has done several takes already, is pulling faces and dancing on the spot to try to keep her energy up. On the cry of “action” she walks past a hooded figure and whispers, “Valar morghulis.” In Game of Thrones’ High Valyrian tongue, that means “All men must die”. It is a customary greeting, one that tells you all you need to know about the show’s moral framework.

Since its inception Game of Thrones has been heading towards a Rubicon moment. The series of books is not complete, and Martin writes at a studiously slow pace. TV moves faster, and the point at which the adaptation catches up with the novels is looming. Next year, neither the fans of the books nor those of the TV show will know what is coming next. But we are assured that Martin, Benioff and Weiss have planned an endgame.

“We know we can finish the story,” producer Bryan Cogman says. So who will be sitting on that Iron Throne when this thing is finished? “I obviously can’t say. Or whether it’ll take six, seven or nine seasons to get there …”

Series five of Game of Thrones begins on Foxtel’s Showcase at 11am and 7.30pm on Monday.

The Telegraph

Correction: Last week, as a result of a production error, a caption on this page incorrectly labelled actor Mark Rylance as playing Oliver Cromwell in Wolf Hall. He plays Thomas Cromwell.