A Wedding And Four Funerals
Entertainment Weekly|March 15 - 22, 2019

Talk about bringing gifts not on the registry. The untold oral history of one of the show’s bloodiest scenes.

James Hibberd
A Wedding And Four Funerals

WORST. WEDDING. EVER.

In the third season’s ninth episode, “The Rains of Castamere,” Game of Thrones staged its most notoriously disturbing sequence: the postnuptial slaughter—a largely faithful adaptation of a chapter in George R.R. Martin’s book A Storm of Swords—of heroic Robb Stark (Richard Madden), along with his mother, Catelyn (Michelle Fairley), pregnant wife, Talisa (Oona Chaplin), beloved direwolf Grey Wind, and thousands of his bannermen. Here the GoT team looks back on filming the haunting affair.

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN (Author) I knew [I’d kill off Robb Stark] almost from the beginning. I killed Ned because everybody thinks, “He’s the hero [and], sure, he’s going to get into trouble, but then he’ll somehow get out of it.” The next predictable thing is to think his eldest son is going to rise up and avenge his father. Everybody is going to expect that. So immediately [killing Robb] became the next thing I had to do. It was the hardest scene I’ve ever had to write.

DAN WEISS (Showrunner) The Red Wedding was the thing we always told ourselves, “If we get to this moment that’s in the books, and if we do it right, then [the show will] be in a pretty good place and the energy that [the twist] injects into this story will be enough to get us through to the end.” But it was a very complex thing to shoot and get right.

MICHELLE FAIRLEY (Catelyn Stark) We were very fortunate—we had a week to shoot the whole wedding sequence, and did it chronologically as well, so every day we edged closer to the slaughter.

This story is from the March 15 - 22, 2019 edition of Entertainment Weekly.

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This story is from the March 15 - 22, 2019 edition of Entertainment Weekly.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.