“Game of Thrones” Creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss Have One (Surprising) Regret
It’s been five years since Game of Thrones ended its eight-season run on HBO. The fantasy series was one of the most successful shows of the modern TV era, drawing viewers from across the globe and becoming a genuine, worldwide phenomenon. It’s a scientifically provable fact that with this level of success comes an equal level of scrutiny, something that creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss are well aware of and wisely chose not to engage with. There were, if you recall, some pointed reactions to the way the juggernaut series concluded. Specifically, the character arc of Emilia Clarke’s formidable Daenerys Targaryen was the subject of much post-finale chatter.
Yet for Benioff and Weiss, the fate of Daenerys Targaryen, let alone any of the other major plot points and character denouements that were resolved during the final season, is not what they’d like a re-do on. The duo, who are set to premiere 3 Body Problem, their first show since GoT, another ambitious adaptation of a novelist’s richly realized world, in this case, Liu Cixin’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy. Yet when they spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about their upcoming series, they revealed a smaller missed opportunity with GoT that they were willing to discuss.
Given the chance, Benioff and Weiss would have brought back a minor character. If you were/are a major Game of Thrones fan and had, say, a hundred guesses, there’s very little chance you’d land on the person they’d have given more screen time to. Ready for it?
Mord the Jailer.
For those not steeped in GoT minutiae, Mord the Jailer (Ciaran Bermingham) was a brutish guard whose dominion was the Sky Cells at the Eyrie. He appeared briefly in season one, and his main role was abusing Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) during his imprisonment there. Yet the crafty Tyrion bribed Mord to help him escape and, per Lannister custom, paid his debts by tossing him a sack of gold coins. Mord! We hardly knew ya, something Benioff and Weiss now regret.
“One thing I know I wish we could have done is there’s the character Mord the Jailer,” Benioff told THR. Weiss echoed this wish, going as far as calling it a “mistake” for not bringing Mord back into the fold.
“We always talked about doing it,” Weiss said.
In fact, they even know the perfect scene to bring Mord back, a sequence set in a tavern. Although they couldn’t recall whether it was Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) or the Hound (Rory McCann) in the tavern, Benioff and Weiss mused that the logical owner of the establishment would have been Mord.
“We realized too late that Mord could have owned the tavern,” Weiss said. “We could have had that actor in the background acting exactly the way he did as a jailer, except now as a small business owner. It was just such an obvious, no-brainer, day-after idea.”
Featured image: Peter Dinklage. Photograph by Macall B. Polay/Courtesy of HBO
