Game of Thrones A-Z (5 page)

DROGO

The Dothraki are a fearsome and incredibly violent nation of raiders. When villagers see their horses coming towards them, they know their end is nigh, with the men killed and women raped. One of them is more feared than most, however.

Drogo is a powerful warlord and a fighter that has never been defeated, which is why Viserys Targaryen conspires for his young sister Daenerys to marry Drogo. The plan is for him to lead his troops against an invasion at the King’s Landing, so that eventually Viserys can reclaim the throne he believes belongs to him.

However, despite his mighty façade, Drogo’s heart softens towards his new wife and he becomes a kind and compassionate husband. His love for her never burns so brightly than when he learns of a failed assassination attempt on her life. Enraged, he decides to lead the invasion against those who would dare take his pregnant wife away from him.

He ends up killing Viserys because of his lack of respect for his sister, but is later wounded by a fellow Dothraki warrior who challenges his leadership. As a consequence, his wound festers, and, after Daenerys unwisely uses black magic to take the life of her child for that of her fatally wounded husband, she is shocked to discover she was duped – her child is no more and her husband is seemingly brain dead.

Daenerys smothers him out of sympathy and uses his funeral pyre to hatch her dragon eggs, calling her favourite dragon Drogon out of respect for her husband. For their Drogo, HBO decided on Jason Momoa – a hulking beefcake who had appeared in 
Baywatch
 and 
Stargate: Atlantis
, where he played the role of Ronon Dex for five years. He also starred as the lead in the remake of 
Conan the Barbarian
.

Born in Hawaii in 1979, but raised in Iowa, Momoa ended up moving back to the island just before he was 20. It was there that he struck a modelling deal and ended up winning Hawaii’s Model of the Year in 1999, leading to his starring in 
Baywatch Hawaii
 for two years.

He is married to 
Cosby Show
 star Lisa Bonet, who gave birth to their daughter Lola Iolani Momoa in 2007, with their son Nakoa-Wolf Manakauapo Namakaeha being added to the brood a year later.

In 2008, Momoa’s face was slashed with a broken glass at a Hollywood café and he received 140 stitches as a result. A 21-year-old man was arrested and sent to prison for five years. Momoa’s scars from the attack are still obvious since the incident.

Landing the part was tough for Momoa, taking seven months between his first and second audition. However, when he came back to read for the character, he knew exactly how to channel the ferocious power of Drogo. When he performed the intimidating Haka war dance, a routine that New Zealand’s All Blacks do before a game, it frightened the life out of the casting agent.

‘It’s a war chant,’ he said to 
Den of Geek
, ‘I just thought, in the scenes I was doing, you don’t get a sense of what this warrior’s like. What it would be like if he was commanding his officers, or what he’d be like in battle. I wanted to represent that and channel a little bit of my ancestry and heritage. I’m half Hawaiian.’

Momoa explained what awaited the agents: ‘I went into HBO and I said, “Don’t be scared or anything, but when you’re in front of a large man doing the Haka, you’re going to feel it. You’re going to feel some energy coming at you.”

‘These two little white women were like, “Holy shit.”

People were coming out of their doors and wondering what was going on. It really sealed the deal. And it got me Conan. It’s a great way to start an audition. My heart was racing, and I’m sure theirs were, too.’

He was clearly excited about the part, adding, ‘I read the book. I had two days and I was hooked. Right after the audition, I read the whole thing, and it’s so great, the way you invest in these characters. You think, in the first few episodes, my character’s just this intimidating badass, but you slowly watch him fall in love and see how frail he is compared to this stoic; you compare him to the other characters, who are meant to be the good guys, and you think they’re totally the opposite. There’s such richness to these characters.’

When he attended a screening of the first episode with his wife, he warned her that she wouldn’t like what she saw. The whole episode paints Drogo as a grunting man beast and a warrior who watches with glee other people suffering, and he barely carries a thought as he roughly beds his new wife on their wedding day.

‘I didn’t want my wife to see 
Game of Thrones
 and she ended up becoming obsessed,’ he told 
Starpulse
. ‘She was dreaming about it, she was so obsessed. We didn’t go to the premiere. I was like, “I don’t do anything but do [have sex with] Emilia Clarke for the first two episodes. I don’t even speak. We don’t need to go.”’

It shouldn’t have just been his wife that he was concerned about – audiences were turned off by his performance in the debut episode. He was too rough and ready, they said, with many mocking his ‘guy-liner’ look.

However, as the series went on, more and more became enraptured by Momoa, as Drogo evolved from the one-note warrior to a man in love. His passing became one of the moving deaths in the series, and fans took to Twitter to mourn his death. Luckily for them, he came back for the end of series two in a cameo appearance, and no one was more pleased than his screen wife, Emilia Clarke, who dubs him her ‘big brother’.

E

EMILIA CLARKE

Born in 1987, Emilia Clarke is a young actress best known for her career-making role as Daenerys Targaryen.

Alongside Tyrion Lannister, Daenerys is George R. R. Martin’s favourite creation from the books, and it’s not hard to see why. Her character’s transformation as the series develops is a startling one, and it required an actress capable of excelling as both a shy girl and later a fierce and loyal leader. When she is first introduced in the series, Daenerys is meek and completely dependent on her brother, Viserys.

He treats his sister as a toy, something malleable for him to manipulate at will and which he can subject to his mood swings, and his cruel and violent streak. And while Daenerys would burn with the same obsession as her brother – the belief that the Iron Throne was their denied birthright – it was Viserys who held this belief from the start.

Daenerys is the only daughter of King Aerys II – the Mad King – and was conceived shortly before Robert’s Rebellion that ended her father’s reign on the Iron Throne.

Her father died before her birth, with her mother dying just after labour, and she was born at her family’s ancestral seat, Dragonstone. She and her brother were smuggled from Dragonstone garrison before they could be turned over to Robert’s soldiers, and were instead taken to the Free City of Braavos. They were eventually forced out of their home, and took to wandering the nine Free Cities in a bid to find support for Viserys’ attempt to wrestle back the throne.

However, Viserys’ desperation amuses many, and he is dubbed The Beggar King. That is, until they find what they want in Pentos, with a powerful Magister named Illyrio Mopatis helping them to reclaim their royal honour. Viserys hatches a plan with Illyrio to marry Daenerys to Khal Drogo, the brutal leader of the Dothraki clan, in the hope that he will lead his army against the King. In the books, the character is far younger than the one portrayed in the series – something that shocked Clarke.

‘Whilst it’s not set in a specific time period because it’s fantastical, it’s kind of loosely based around what you may believe to be social situations in medieval times,’ she said to
heyyouguys.co.uk
. ‘In that sense, everything was younger, people died younger, so it’s less shocking in terms of that.

But at the same time, it just proves that she’s more of a complex, incredible character that she came to those realisations so young.’ During the wedding, she receives three dragon eggs from Illyrio – merely decorative symbolic stones, as dragons were believed to be extinct. Westeros knight Jorah Mormont offers both books and his service.

Because Daenerys is something of a nomad herself, she feels beholden to her new family – and stands up to her bullying brother, before eventually watching him die at the hands of her husband, Drogo.

After the death of her beloved Drogo, she constructs a funeral pyre for his body, placing her dragon eggs near his body and stepping on to the blazing fire. Jorah is convinced it’s suicide, but she knows differently, strongly believing she has a connection with the dragons. And her instincts are right – the following morning she is alive with three hatched dragons clinging to her charred body.

As her dragons grow, so do the tales around the Seven Kingdoms, leading to a whole host of danger that comes with owning such prized creatures. After seeking shelter and barely escaping with their lives in the Qarth, she looks to find more support for her attempt to win back her believed birthright.

‘I just think of her getting stronger and stronger,’ said Clarke. ‘She gets her trust boundaries tested to the max in season two, so in that sense it’s intriguing. She’s coming up with having to deal with [being] not only a woman, but a young girl in a man’s world, in a male-orientated society that she has to come up against, and even having dragons doesn’t seem to make a huge amount of difference.’

SPOILER:
Without Drogo, and with only Jorah’s words to comfort her, Daenerys begins to grow tired of Jorah’s advances and of him thinking of her as only a child, so she sets out her claim as a kind but strong leader – using her dragons against those cities who use slaves, and asserting her leadership over Jorah. Unsurprisingly, there are people that would like her killed, and she is only saved from an assassination attempt by a man named Arstan Whitebeard – who ends up being famed knight Barristan Selmy. Exiled from his Kingsguard duties by Cersei Lannister, he seeks Daenerys out as the true queen of the Seven Kingdoms. He also tells her that Jorah was once a spy for Varys at the Red Keep, keeping him informed of Daenerys’ movements. She sends them both on an apparent suicide mission during the Siege of Meeren, and when they both survive Selmy apologises for his duplicity. Jorah is less pleading, however, and, while she wants to pardon him, she has no choice but to banish her former right-hand man. Word quickly starts to spread around Westeros of a young queen with dragons. However, after a six-year-old girl is believed to have been killed by one of her dragons, she orders them to be locked below ground to prevent any more similar deaths. But one of them, Drogon, named after her beloved husband, escapes. She marries again in a bid to quell the wars that rage around her as she attempts to get the boats to lead her army to King’s Landing. Ending the slave trade has destroyed the economies of several Free Cities, and as such there is much diplomacy needed for her to survive. When Drogon appears in a gladiatorial pit marked for her honour, he is wounded by an animal handler. However, she rushes to his defence, mounting him and then flying away.

For Clarke, it wasn’t a part that came easily – the role was originally played by another actress in the un-aired pilot before she was eventually cast as Daenerys.

‘I was only aware of it when we got down to the final stages really, that they had already cast someone who was in a pilot that was only seen internally,’ Clarke said to
heyyouguys.co.uk
.

‘Once they decided to give the whole show the go-ahead, they decided to do a number of recasts, including Dany [Daenerys] as a character.’

Clarke was born in London, and quickly showed an interest in acting after seeing the musical 
Show Boat
 on stage, where her father worked as a theatre sound engineer.

She studied at the Drama Centre London, and eventually landed a small-screen role in an episode of the soap 
Doctors
 in 2009, and then in 2010’s Syfy movie 
Triassic Attack
. Clarke remarked, ‘I told my parents I wanted to be an actor and they were getting ready for a life of unemployment so they’re just happy I’m in work!’

She then landed the role in 
Game of Thrones
. ‘My life is pretty much unrecognisable to what it was before. It’s incredible!’ she said to 
heyyouguys.co.uk
. ‘Never in a million years did I think I’d be doing something like this now, this early on so fresh out of drama school. Even having 
Game of
 
Thrones
, I never knew that it would be the success that it was, and hopefully will continue to be. ‘They took a massive risk with me. I had a couple of auditions then a screen-test in LA and then they gave me the part. It was as simple as that, there’s no huge story to tell.’

She says about her character, ‘I think first and foremost she’s a survivalist, and she knows what she needs to do to survive. Unlike many other characters in the show, she doesn’t have an egotistical need or desire or want for the Iron Throne; it’s something that is her destiny, that she genuinely doesn’t have any control over. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown” – if she didn’t have to do it then she probably wouldn’t. In terms of that, she just realises what her options are and has to make an incredibly difficult choice. I have a problem with her using her sexuality. It’s more she knows what she has to do and, as a result of that, finds the love that she finds with Khal [Drogo] and grows in confidence.’

F

FANTASY

For a long time, fantasy has been seen either as silly stories about monsters or a genre packed with stories so mammoth and dense that viewers or readers needed an encyclopaedia of that world to understand what is going on.

These fantastical worlds often featured even more fantastical characters and genre stereotypes. But Peter Jackson’s 
Lord of the Rings
changed that. Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic trilogy, Jackson’s films were triumphs in every sense. A triumph in getting made in the first place (not many studios will agree to filming three fantasy films back to back with a director pretty new to the Hollywood blockbuster lark), a box-office triumph and an Oscar triumph. It changed fantasy overnight.

Ian Bogost, Professor of Digital Media at Georgia Institute of Technology, told CNN that 
The Lord of the
 
Rings
 was the start of making fantasy mainstream. ‘Probably Peter Jackson is to blame,’ he said. ‘This is all really about Peter Jackson. The hugely successful 
Lord of the Rings
 movies not only taught untrained viewers how to watch epic fantasy on the big screen, it also proved to Hollywood that fantasy could be a viable mass-market genre. The 
Lord
 
of the Rings
 films are 10 years old at this point, and they were incredibly lucrative. That’s what it takes – an investment that shows that the private sector will go and watch these.’