Game of Thrones Cast and Producers Played These 5 Hilarious Pranks on Each Other

Game of Thrones may be filled with a ton of explicit and dramatic scenes best left for grown-ups, but that doesn't mean the cast and the producers of the hit HBO series don't amuse themselves on set from time to time.

As revealed by Entertainment Weekly, there are four pranks that took place behind the cameras in Game of Thrones which were started by the series' showrunners themselves – David Benioff and Dan Weiss.

The actors involved? John Bradley-West, Kit Harrington, Rose Leslie, and Alfie Allen. Of course, the producers thought no one would be able to pull a prank on them. Unfortunately for Benioff and Weiss, there's one actor who was able to prank them, impressively even involving lawyers.

Prank on John Bradley

The prank on the Samwell Tarly actor took place during filming of Season 6, and this one didn't just involve the show's producers. According to Benioff and Weiss, they asked help from Harrington and Hannah Murray, who plays Gilly. Apparently, it all stemmed from Murray's sentiments about her clothing from past seasons.

Weiss recalls:

Hannah has long had the sh–tiest costumes onGame of Thrones;she's been in a burlap sack for five years. She was so happy that she finally gets into a real piece of clothing this year. So Kit and Hannah thought it would be funny to play a joke on John and let him think he's going to get a new costume too.

He adds that he and Benioff also had to ask help from the costume department to schedule a mock fitting for Bradley, just for effect:

We thought it would be great to make the costume ludicrous, but just believable enough to not know it was a gag – so he'd think he would be wearing this on screen. The result, as you can see in the exclusive photo above, "was all rental stuff, very Henry the VIII, with Tudor bloomers and a massive codpiece that wasn't even the same color as the rest of the costume.

Image Credit: Game of Thrones (via Entertainment Weekly)

As for Bradley-West, the 27-year-old English actor was very obedient with the fitting, even though his costume looked horrible. He said:

I looked so bad and ridiculous, it was unbelievable. There was a huge vulgar codpiece – though flattering, to be sure. The reason I bought it is because we'd never seen Sam at home before, and [his parents think] he's an idiot. [Maybe] Sam dressed like an idiot before he came to Castle Black.

Bradley-West said that Benioff eventually told him that it was all a prank:

You always think you're not going to fall for those [pranks]. You always think, ‘I'll see through that,' and I cannot believe I didn't see through it! … I don't think piracy is hurting the show too much – they've still got a bit of budget to set aside and make me look like Elmer the Patchwork Elephant.

Weiss adds:

He was such a good sport about it, but [in the photo] you can see the look on his face…

Prank on Kit Harrington

This prank took place during Season 1 filming, and it involved Harrington's hair and face. Thankfully, nothing really bad happened to the 29-year-old actor, but it turns out that the producers sent him a script that involved a horrible deformity on Jon Snow.

According to EW, the script is found in co-executive producer Bryan Cogman's book, Inside HBO's Game of Thrones: Seasons 1 & 2. It reads:

Jon plunges his hand into the fire, seizes the burning drapes, and FLINGS them at the dead man, engulfing them both in flames," reads the script. And then after the action concludes: When the fire is finally out, we see by torchlight that all of Jon's hair has burnt down to the scalp. The skin on the top half of his face has been melted in the extreme heat, blistered and pustulant. Despite what must be the extreme agony of permanent disfigurement, Jon stands stoically by his master's side.

Mormont then says to Jon: "Gods, boy. I was wrong about you. You're a ranger, through and through!" And the scene's script description concludes with this: "Jon smiles, his teeth shining brightly in his destroyed face. Mormont, sickened, has to look away."

Weiss said that Harrington gamely acted the scene, which HBO thought was "too Harry Potter, and they wanted to do something to make it darker. They thought he was such a strong actor that he could handle it.' We kept this up until we started laughing. He was a remarkably good sport about the whole thing."

Prank on Rose Leslie

Since the producers learned that the Ygritte actress was afraid of singing, they made Leslie sing in public.

Benioff recalled:

We heard that Rose was afraid of singing. There's a song in the books that Ygritte sings, ‘The Last of the Giants…'The earnest song byThronesauthor George R.R. Martin is 20 lines long and contains lyrics such as "Oooooooh, I am the last of the giants, so learn well the words of my song, or when I am gone the singing will fade, and the silence shall last long and long.

I can only imagine how Leslie pulled that off.

Prank on Alfie Allen

The producers made the Theon Greyjoy actor believe that his character is going to be killed off by Bran Stark.

As told by EW:

[The script] concluded with young Bran Stark declaring to Theon, "This is my Winterfell, not yours," and then stabbing him in the heart. Even though it meant leaving the show, Allen says he thought this was a great plot twist. "I thought it was cool," Allen said.

Since the 29-year-old actor wasn't sure his character is going to survive, he went on holiday. He said:

I went on a holiday, and David and Dan were all thinking I was going to call up going, ‘Hold on a minute whoa-whoa-whoa!' But I just got on with it. Then they had to make it clear to me later on it was all a joke.

Prank on producers

Last, but not least, is the prank pulled on the producers themselves. It was Jaime Lannister actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who made the brave move, and it involved his character's hair. This left the producers horrified, naturally. Weiss recalled:

Nikolaj wrote this Angry Actor Email about how he was very upset that we were changing his hairstyle. He said he felt the need to own his hair because his hair was part of his character, and he was going to take it upon himself to get his own haircut that he felt best reflected Jaime Lannister as he saw him. He said he hoped we'd understand and he'd send us a picture shortly.

70 hours later he sent us a picture of him with this military buzzcut. He shaved all his hair off!

We thought we'll have to get a Jaimie Lannister wig at last minute at tremendous expense. HBO's lawyers were calling his lawyers…

The 45-year-old actor eventually admitted that the photo was from five years back.

It's cool seeing the cast and producers playing these pranks on each other. They surely need it, each episode from the series comes with a ton of stressful scenes and they definitely can't take them seriously.

Game of Thrones airs on Sunday at HBO at 9 p.m. EST.

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