When I first watched Ted Lasso, I had totally forgotten that Hannah Waddington was in Game of Thrones. I had only remembered her from her small role on Sex Education. Hannah, as most of you probably do remember, played Septa Unella on GOT, aka the nun who walked Cersi through the town while chanting “shame.” And if you had also forgotten, you’re welcome!
Anyway, Hannah was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week to promote her upcoming film, The Fall Guy, which she co-stars in with Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. During the interview, she spoke about some pretty disturbing behind-the-scenes details involving the scene where Cersei imprisons Unella and waterboards her with wine. Hannah and Lena Headley have already shared that they hated filming that scene because poor Hannah was really waterboarded (wineboarded?). Well, Hannah revealed to Stephen that the entire experience left her with “chronic claustrophobia.”
“Thrones gave me something I wasn’t expecting from it, and that is chronic claustrophobia,” Hannah told Stephen. “I’ve talked about it since with David Benioff and David Weiss, the two exec producers on it, I was like: ‘Good job it was for them because it was horrific. 10 hours of being actually waterboarded… Like, actually waterboarded.”
Hannah went on to insist that the reality of her scene is what made Game of Thrones such a great series, saying: “The reason why I don’t believe it’s touched yet in terms of the cinematography of it, for a series, it’s just a different level. But with that comes actual waterboarding.”
Detailing her grueling day on set, she recalled: “I’m strapped to a table with all these leather straps, and I couldn’t lift up my head because they said that it would be too obvious that it’s loose. And I was like: ‘Right, I’d quite like it to be loose!’”
Once filming for the scene had wrapped, Hannah was looking a little worse for wear in a “fancy pants” elevator, and she said: “I had grape juice all in my hair, so it went purple. I couldn’t speak because the Mountain [another character] had his hand over my mouth while I was screaming, and I had strap marks everywhere like I had been attacked.”
“And the [elevator] doors opened, and one of the other guys who had been shooting something else was like: ‘What has happened to you?’” she laughed. “And I told him everything, and he went: ‘Well, you’re lucky. I’ve just been crawling through shit on my elbows for four days.’ And we were laughing about the fact that both of us are in Game of Thrones, and it kind of doesn’t matter when you’re in Thrones. You just want to give the best.”
My goodness, that is absolutely awful. It is unacceptable to put a human being through literal torture just for the sake of making a scene look realistic. Was there no other way for showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and their production team to figure out how to not waterboard a woman for 10 hours? And poor Hannah is not the first GOT actor to talk about the trauma they’ve endured as a result of filming the show. Both Sophie Turner and Iwan Rheon have talked about how awful it was to film that horrible Season 5 scene where Ramsay rapes Sansa on their wedding night. Iwan has called it the “worst day of my career” and Sophie has said she expects to “exhibit some symptoms of trauma” at some point. Kit Harrington has also revealed that his mental health and alcohol abuse struggles were heightened “directly due to the nature of the show.”
I totally understand that the Game of Thrones book series is this dark and graphic. I’m not saying that creators should stay away from adapting from that type of source material. But when you have multiple actors talking about how much filming a show f—ked them up, that’s on production. They should not be torturing actors. Why weren’t they providing mental health counseling on set? I don’t know what the answer is, but there has to be a better way to handle filming an intense and graphically violent series than Benioff and Weiss did.
Here’s Hannah’s interview with Stephen:
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