December Fifith Promo.

[aimlessgun]

Jaime is definitely VERY good looking according the books, but I also didn't get the impression that he was supposed to be the hottest looking guy of all of Westeros.

I also don't think he's clearly less hot than another actor, is he? Brady, who are you considering to be clearly more attractive? It feels like a tossup based on taste to me, where depending on the person Jaime could easily be it. But I'm a guy so my personal opinion might not be that relevant :P

[Asha—Not Yara!]

Well, as a woman I can say I'm QUITE pleased with the actor they chose for Jaime. ;) I do think he's the hottest guy on the series, but the person I was responding to wasn't too impressed, which is fine of course. Things like this are pretty subjective.

[Werthead]

Question: io9 commentators have indicated that they can see scenes where Lena Headey is pregnant (can't quite see them myself, to be honest). This was surprising, as I thought Lena was only pregnant during the filming of the pilot and had her baby months before S1 started filming? Does this mean more shots from the pilot are in the series than previously thought? Or was the timing wrong and Lena gave birth during the series itself? Or are they just blowing smoke? The only scene where she looks like she might be pregnant was in her confrontation with Sean Bean, but it appears to be just the way she's holding her dress (when she turns to leave, you can see she's quite slim).

[Padraig]

She was pregnant when the pilot was been filmed, so not sure are io9 just letting their inaccurate preconceptions lead them awry!

Ancient Arab men would wear kohl in the desert. Maybe that's where they got the idea from?

Nice catch. :)

[Ran]

Fight choreography is by Buster Reeves and Paul Jennings. Reeves is a martial artist and has been a stunt man for a decade, and has started to move into fight arranging; he was Christian Bale's lead stunt double in Batman Beginsand The Dark Knight[/i,] and was key in developing Batman's fighting style in that film and its sequel. He was fight arranger for Mission Impossible III, among other things.

Jennings has been a stunt man for twenty years and a coordinator for the last decade, with the Batman films and things like Munich and The World is Not Enough under his belt.

The legendary William Hobbs has provided some unofficial tutorials to Miltos Yerolemou (Syrio) and, I gather, the production to help develop waterdancing. Don't think he's involved in anything else, but he did tell Miltos he was very familiar with the production's stunt coordinator team (probably has worked with Jennings, for example) and said they were top-notch.

All that said, as Conan Stevens has noted, fight choreography for the screen is a visual art, and it's not going to be devoted to absolute realism. Characters will fight in ways that say something about them and their personality and so on.

Werthead,

As to Ned's skills, Ned never really discusses them. He just says he would have died if it hadn't been for Reed. But Bronze Yohn Royce takes both him and Ser Rodrik down while sparring at Winterfell, and we have GRRM basically outright saying that Ned was capable but not brilliant.

He was good enough to survive the war. A lot of people were good enough, or lucky enough, without being the most dangerous swordsmen in Westeros. But my understanding is that the pilot script explicitly says, in the description, that Ned is one of the most dangerous swordsmen in the Seven Kingdoms, or something like that.

Oh, and Headey's pregnancy ... no, I can't think of a scene that we've seen where she's pregnant. Certainly not the scene when speaking to Ned in the Red Keep.

[Prince Bran]

I also don't think he's clearly less hot than another actor, is he? Brady, who are you considering to be clearly more attractive? It feels like a tossup based on taste to me, where depending on the person Jaime could easily be it. But I'm a guy so my personal opinion might not be that relevant :P

I agree, I don't know who Brady is referring to, but it's a bizarre criticism. I'm also a guy, but I think NCW is objectively more attractive (using symmetry and other guidelines) than any other male actor on the show, except for perhaps Momoa. Given that they're on separate continents, I don't see how it's an issue. Asking for a more attractive actor than the one they've got is not only unrealistic, but next to impossible.

[Lady Blackfish]

Your analysis of Cat is pretty interesting. I had to look up the definition of virago, and I just never got that vibe from her. Maybe it's been too long since I read AGoT (lost my copy so my last reread started with ACoK). She's definitely a strong person in a lot of ways, but I didn't imagine it in the way you describe. I wonder if a subconscious bias in me towards Cat as the dutiful, strong but subdued mother figure made my brain ignore descriptions to the contrary in the books.

I think she has conflicting elements in her personality. She's very controlled, but that's an active process. Her mouth always tightens to say more than she allows herself to, she feels like slapping people a lot, when Tyrion walks into the inn ordering something she thinks "And may he choke on it", etc. And it does come out sometimes, whenever she come across as sharp-tongued, ie when she's at Bitterbridge Renly advises Randyll Tarly to give her a wide birth (see, Cat actually does say stuff like "My son isn't just sitting around playing at war"). I'm not saying she's an amazon, and she's definitely vulnerable a lot, but she just doesn't strikes me as a person to ever let that actually show. She becomes more subdued later because she's clinically depressed or something, but that shouldn't be the effect at the start IMO.

Re. hot Jaime: I think beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so ultimately you can't say who is the single most attractive man in Westeros. Renly was the most handsome man Sansa ever saw, but Jeyne Poole fell in love with Beric Dondarrion on sight, etc. However, you can get a sense of a group of generally attractive people. Jaime should definitely be on the highest tier ("Was there ever a man more beautiful or more vile"), and personally NCW is on my highest tier of hot men on the show. Female fans I talked to mention him, Momoa and Richard Madden as the designated eye candy. Combine Jaime's rich kid attitude and his shiny clothing, and I think it's easy to see him being That Guy, the guy all guys wanna be and all girls wanna be with, etc. JMO :)

[Lord of Autumn's End]

Hey Ran, I know its a long shot but do you know if either Buster Reeves or Paul Jennings have any western martial art experience, such as ARMA or fencing? As a martial artist myself, one of the most irritating things I see in television and movies is when they hire fight choreographers who don't fit the setting.

[JungianQueen]

Jaime's hotness. Interestingly enough, I found Jaime to be more and more attractive once he got his own POV and showed us (the reader) that he had more than just one "bad guy" dimension. Before that, I kind of ignored him in terms of attractiveness until book 3. I have a feeling that as his character arc progresses, he'll become more and more attractive to some of the female viewers.

[Ran]

That, I do not know. :) I imagine he's at least somewhat familiar with the basics of these things, as I know stunt men and fight coordinators associate widely with such groups and pick up bits and pieces through trade magazines and the like. But that's not the same thing as actually being trained.

[Green Apple Fossoway]

On the HBO website they start the description of the show with the line

Quote

Summers span Decades, Winters can last a lifetime

Now I had put that down to the usual exaggeration you get on bookcover burbs and so on however when reading the leaked pilot script I saw that Robert specifically states that the next winter will last Twenty to Thirty years.

Well, with a harsh enough winter, a lifetime can be plenty short, no?

[Ran]

I have, BTW, finished the screencap gallery for "Inside Game of Thrones". To think, if it had been the length of an episode, I might have had something upwads of 700 images to screencap.. ;) I will be much more conservative when the show starts, I think.

Here I've some links, to the gallery proper and to the first image in the gallery.

[Bubs]

Thanks so much Ran! I love reading your comments.

I do have a question regarding one of the 'caps:

http://www.westeros.org/GoT/Gallery/Entry/1999/

They wouldn't do away with Dany's pregnancy, would they? :unsure:

[Mya Stone]

Thanks so much Ran! I love reading your comments.

I do have a question regarding one of the 'caps:

http://www.westeros.org/GoT/Gallery/Entry/1999/

They wouldn't do away with Dany's pregnancy, would they? :unsure:

I don't think they would do away with Dany's defining tragedy and "moment" in the first book. I would think that she's just not as pregnant as she was in the book, which I can understand. Filming with a huge belly is awfully cumbersome, I would imagine, especially with the clothing she dons - there would have to be a prosthetic belly of some sort. Not that it's out of HBO's capability of making a real looking fake belly, but I would think it might be more of a production headache than it's worth.

But really, we're only seeing one (blurry) glimpse of a scene. Dany may end up becoming much more pregnant the more sickly Drogo gets. That might actually make a really good story-telling parallel. Her warrior becoming more infant-like as the life inside her becomes more warrior-like.

ETA: Thanks, Ran, for being so committed. I loved going through the screencaps. :kiss:

[delete this account pls]

See, I don't think Jaime came across as a smarmy villain at all in AGoT. Right from the start it seemed like there was a lot more to him. I suppose some of that was due to his interactions with Tyrion though, and we havent seen those two together in any of the previews that I've seen

Weren't Renly and Loras both considered "hotter?"

Hmmm, could be. I'm sure Sansa would say so. I don't know, the passage that always struck me was when Cat confronts Jaime in ACoK. He's filthy. Covered in his own shit. She knows him for a sisterfucker, an oathbreaker. She also knows him as the man that crippled her favourite child.

And she still thinks he's beatiful.

It has even more weight because ...this is coming from Cat! She isn't one to be easily impressed by a pretty face.

Also, I should restate, I'm not saying the actor isn't a very handsome guy. He clearly is. But so are most of the other male actors on the show. NCW isn't leaping out at me anymore than Jon, Robb, Viserys, or Drogo, or hell, even Jory Cassell and Bronn. And in the books, I can't imagine many (or any) people comparing Jon Snow with Jaime Lannister looks-wise.

I know this is all subjective. And I'm sure the female and gay male fans will mostly love Jaime in this. And I also realise that Jaime is probably one of the hardest roles to cast. I'm just a little worried, is all.

[Abaddon]

Lady Blackfish, what do you think of the brief shot of Cat at 2:29 in? I think she looks very good there... much more of the steel within showing here than in the earlier scenes.

[Lady Blackfish]

Hrmm, well that was the shot I was referring to when I said she looked rather nervous at the royals' arrival. She drops her gaze and seems to swallow a bit. I suppose to me she didn't come off as steely, rather unnerved, a bit worn and less chic than I was expecting, frankly. (Cat's nowhere near the extravagant dresser Cersei is, but neither is she a humble one. There's a bit of monologue where she assumes Brienne would want fine fine lady's garments, because that's what ladies wear, and that's the kind of woman Cat is, she does what ladies do in the society. I felt she was dressed more impressively here, which is the opposite of what I would expect since the latter scene is when she's traveling on a very hard road and the former is the arrival of the king of Westeros, an event for which she'd surely look impressive.) She's not frilly, but she ought to have impeccable decorum and sophistication, IMO. She seemed almost like she woke up a bit too late and forgot about their arrival? Maybe a wider shot would help, though. It's very little from which to tell.

[So1ar]

See, I don't think Jaime came across as a smarmy villain at all in AGoT. Right from the start it seemed like there was a lot more to him. I suppose some of that was due to his interactions with Tyrion though, and we havent seen those two together in any of the previews that I've seen

i agree. it will add some depth to him once we see how much he cares for tyrion when we see how everyone else (including his father/sister) look at him him.

Also, I should restate, I'm not saying the actor isn't a very handsome guy. He clearly is. But so are most of the other male actors on the show. NCW isn't leaping out at me anymore than Jon, Robb, Viserys, or Drogo, or hell, even Jory Cassell and Bronn. And in the books, I can't imagine many (or any) people comparing Jon Snow with Jaime Lannister looks-wise.

I know this is all subjective. And I'm sure the female and gay male fans will mostly love Jaime in this. And I also realise that Jaime is probably one of the hardest roles to cast. I'm just a little worried, is all.

that's the thing with fantasy though. what human being on earth could live up to that description? would brad pitt's blonde version of achillies in troy live up to the description of jaime lannister? would anyone?

[Abaddon]

Ah, I was looking at a still frame where she is looking straight ahead, and missed her dropping her gaze and swallowing, which ruins the image. But as you say it is very little to go on. I like the look of her face where she is looking ahead though! I wasn't really looking at the clothes, more the face.

[Ran]

I think she's schooling her expression there, so to speak.

Robert has said something, or Cersei has said something, upsetting -- at the exact same moment that she shifts her eyes away, Ser Rodrik's proud smile turns to a frown. I wonder what it is?

Maybe it's Robert telling Ned he wants to go to the crypt. Visiting the tombs of his family probably leaves Eddard maudlin, and she's up to here with his emo. ;)