If you, like me, watched the Game of Thrones pilot for the first time without having ever read the books or even having really heard of the show at all, you were probably at a loss for words but really only kept watching because of the “snow zombies” that made an appearance as well as that hot, steamy incest scene at the end. Boy oh boy, do these writers know how to keep an audience tuned in – recurring brother/sister sex between two very hot actors, maimed children and decapitating zombies – what more could you want in an HBO series?
However the glorious pilot we’ve all come to know and love was apparently not what the writers had originally come up with. Sir John Standing, the actor who played Jon Arryn’s dead corpse in the pilot, has come forward to describe what sounds like the most nonsensical scene in Thrones history that was originally included in the first episode. Speaking to Los Siete Reinos:
He said “I want you to get out of your bed and I want you to crawl across the room and I want you to put your hand up and there’s a bottle of ink on the table. And I want you to take it as though you’re going to write something. The bottle of ink will come crashing down, you’ll be covered in ink. And then the queen will come in and she’ll stamp on your fingers and you’ll die.
And I said “Got it, okay. Whatever.”
So I did this and it was just lunatic, I can only tell you. And then this woman came in who was adorable, it was Lena [Hedley], she was just the best. And she came in and did her bit and everything. And the scene inevitably got cut. To nothing!
But the other part of the scene was when I’m actually dead lying on a table with stones on my eyes with eyes painted on the stones. And I still get fan mail for my part in Game of Thrones, ‘Oh wonderful performance in Game of Thrones!’ The only performance I’ve got is a corpse lying there dead with stones on my eyes. And I get fan mail for it! Which goes to show the lunacy of Game of Thrones, to me, anyways.
For those of you who’ve been following the show up through season five, you know that Cersei coming in and stomping on Jon Arryn makes no sense – first of all, Lysa Arryn, Jon’s crazy boobie-milkin’ wife, was the one who poisoned him, not Cersei. Second of all, Cersei is cold and calculating; whenever she makes a move in the “game of thrones” it’s always 1. Thoroughly planned out and 2. Really, really belligerently stupid. In this case, stomping on Jon Arryn only fills one of these criteria. There’s no way she could’ve known he was dying at that exact moment, and what if someone saw her stomping on him? There’s little birds everywhere, you know. And besides, for the heartless bitch that Cersei is I honestly can’t see her going apeshit on the frail old man that Jon Arryn was. How did she know he wouldn’t pull through? How did she know he was dying and not just…I don’t know, being old and flopping around on the ground? It makes no sense.
Of course that’s why it wasn’t included in the pilot – because it was stupid. Luckily for us, the original pilot was completely scrapped anyway with Jon Arryn’s only appearance was as a corpse with stones on his eyes. Good riddance.
[H/T Los Sientos & Uproxx via io9]