It’s the strongest physical reaction I’ve ever had to reading anything.
You spend so much time with these characters before then.
I read [the books] by season-by-season.
I also made the fatal flaw of Googling.
So that kind of reinforced what people were hintingsaying that something terrible was going to happen and giggling.
It’s something that anyone who’s read the books will talk about it.
So people take great delight in knowing.
There’s something incredibly dramatic and brutal about The Red Wedding, the shock of it.
I also knew I was going to come to a demise at the end of season 3.
So I knew when my time was up but I didn’t know much else.
When it came time to shoot it there was so much pressure.
The Red Wedding was filmed over the course of five days in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2012.
It was scheduled as the final sequence Madden and Fairley would film for the show.
The first half of the banquet lulls the viewer into a feeling of ease.
We have to hint the Freys aren’t good guys but hopefully kept the element of surprise.
CHAPLIN: We had become such a family.
I hadn’t clocked that the end was neigh.
I was in quite happy disbelief for all the scenes leading up to it.
So every day we edged closer to the slaughter.
By the end of the week, you were getting emotional.
But you have to remain [looking] fooled as well.
NUTTER:Prettychronological, you’re able to’t do it too chronologically.
But I made sure that the most powerful points were near the end of the shoot.
These are beloved characters that everybody loved being around.
You want to build up the emotional journey of the sequence.
BENIOFF: [Robb and Catelyn] have been through so much.
They’ve been through the death of Ned.
They had a major falling out after she released Jaime.
They managed to get through that and work back through into a loving relationship.
He’s so happy with that and feeling so good about that.
And there’s a real connection with his proud mother.
Catelyn and Robb are having this conciliation.
I didn’t want to make the audience feel like something bad was going to happen.
It was all about touching it softly, not quite hard, so it could build up even more.
It comes out of left field.
It’s at a wedding feast.
Robb has made his peace, and you think the worst is over.
Then it comes out of nowhere.
There are also secondary characters killed.
Then outside, hundreds of Stark people are killed.
It’s not just two people.
CHAPLIN:Beat, beat, beat, beatwhich surprised me.
It surprised me every time, the gallons of blood coming out of my belly.
It’s quite a violent thing when somebody creeps up behind you and starts stabbing you.
It was horrendous, very little acting required.
NUTTER:There is a moment when Robb goes over to Talisa and sees her life fade away.
He’s such a tremendous actor, and he was hitting a home run.
I remember hearing people crying, and it was the hair and makeup people.
CHAPLIN:I was actually crying while I was dead.
You’re dead, just be dead."
And she was just bawling.
It’s a bittersweet thing.
You’re making all these people sad.
But on the other hand, that’s kind of the idea.
If we shot The Red Wedding and nobody got emotional, it would be a failure.
MADDEN:Arya being so close to getting to me really cut me up even more.
With every episode, Robb’s been further and further from people he loves.
And that’s what made me really emotional about it.
Catelyn makes a desperate last stand.
The woman is just grief-stricken.
But she doesn’t lose control.
MARTIN: [Catelyn] has the moment there, to plead.
There’s also her murdering the hostage.
[She’s not a wife] Frey particularly values.
So, in the end, her bluff is empty.
And she carries through.
There’s a certain power to that too, hopefully.
FAIRLEY: You want retribution for her son’s death.
It’s brave and it’s gutsy and I don’t give a flying f what happens to me.
I’ve lost all my children and my husband, so what else do I have to live for?
She comes from a very honorable family.
Her whole life has been about honor and doing the right thing.
In some way, she’s been held back by her sense of honor and duty.
She’s constantly questioning her motives and actions.
This is one where she doesn’t.
I’m not questioning this, I’m just doing it.
I think it’s incredibly liberating.
She’s standing there after like there’s nothing left for her.
She’s dead already.
She can’t go on.
So I called “action.”
Her performance in that scene is just epic.
MADDEN:It was, Michelle and I, our last scene onGame of Thrones.
It had been an exhausting five-day shoot.
We were mentally exhausted.
I cried my eyes out, completelyas did a lot of the crew and other actors.
It was very emotional.
The wrap party was that night, but I had to start filming another job the next day.
So I washed my blood off and got on a plane.
WEISS:We tried to call Michelle afterwards.
She wasn’t answering.
FAIRLEY: Dan had left me a voicemail and I did give a shot to ring him back.
But by the end of the day, I was a walking shell.
When I was there I wasn’t seeing everything.
They killed his wolf!
And Arya was there!
All of this stuff was happening around it.
And then there’s this silencethere is no music in the credits.
It just sits in your belly.
I don’t like violence and this was actually really well done.
It was more about the emotion.
Michelle’s scream was like, “That’s it.”
My heart was broken.
I was like, “I’m never watching this show againI’m out!”
And then I watched seasons 4, and 5, and 6, and 7.
MADDEN: It was an amazing experience, all because of David Nutter directing it.
He made it an operatic epic sequence that just blows you away.
The shocks you get in the book and subtleties from the book I remember reading.
Those little details that suddenly all piece together in one big slamming action.
I felt good about it.
It was the best gift I could have ever had.
It’s mixing up those moments with somebody making a horrible mistake and paying the worst possible price.
A monster doesn’t come out of the woodwork and chop these people up.
The monsters are our other characters who aren’t monsters but people with their own motivations and goals.
The fact this thing is happening because of somebody else we know lends to its epic tragic dimension.
It’s the kind of thing that hammers home that everybody’s life is precious and precarious.
You don’t get that here at all.
There’s no redemptive moment.
There’s just horror and slaughter.
It’s just like a kidney punch.
What can you say to someone who says they’ll never read your book again?
People read books for different reasons.
Some read for comfort.
They don’t want to get hit in the mouth with something horrible.
We all want that at times.
There’s a certain vicarious release to that.
So I’m not dismissive of people who want that.
But that’s not the kind of fiction I write, in most cases.
It’s certainly not what [A Song of] Ice and Fire is.
It tries to be more realistic about what life is.
It has joy, but it also had pain and fear.
I think the best fiction captures life in all its light and darkness.
