Westeros Blog: The Dancing Master?s Dancing Master

[Westeros]

In a follow-up to our recent item about the legendary fight choreography William Hobbs being involved in training Miltos Yerolemou for his role as Syrio Forel in HBO’s Game of Thrones, Miltos has commented over at Winter is Coming that while Hobbs is not officially associated with the production, he’s taken a hand in helping Miltos develop the Braavosi waterdancing style. Miltos also confirms that Buster Reeves—who was Christian Bale’s stunt double in the Batman films, and helped develop the superhero’s unique fighting style—is still involved as fight choreographer in Game of Thrones after having arranged the fights in the pilot.

As with many of the actors, Miltos has been in Belfast for read throughs and rehearsal, and apparently has run through some of his fight choreography with Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark.

One other thing mentioned is the fact that Hobbs discussed the Rob Roy fight with Miltos “at length”, which may give a sense of the approach they’ll be taking with Syrio’s superlative waterdancing skills. For your edification (and because we really think it’s the best bit of fencing choreography we’ve ever seen), the climactic fight scene from the film, choreographed by Hobbs:

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[LadyIce]

Thank you for the extra details on this.

I'm really pleased to hear that William Hobbs has been selected to train the actor portraying Syrio Forel. The climatic fight scene in Rob Roy was amazingly well choreographed. :fencing:

I wonder if the waterdancing techniques of Syrio will have some unusual fencing moves or stick to the standard European period manouvers. When I read the GoT book, I tried to picture just what type of fencing Syrio taught Arya, but GRRM leaves a lot to the imagination.