David Benioff and D.B. Weiss talk about the infamous gaffe in the final season of the HBO hit fantasy series, admitting they initially thought it was not real.
- Oct 7, 2020
AceShowbiz - David Benioff and D.B. Weiss "couldn't believe" it when eagle-eyed viewers spotted a takeout coffee cup during an episode of "Game of Thrones".
In "The Last of the Starks", the fourth episode of the HBO fantasy series' eighth and final season - several of the show's main characters gather to celebrate their victory in a vicious battle.
However, the jubilant scene proved memorable for all the wrong reasons, after a modern to-go coffee cup was spotted among the revellers.
Speaking with James Hibberd for his upcoming book "Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon", which tells the story of the production of the show, showrunners Benioff and Weiss addressed the infamous moment, admitting they thought it was a "prank."
"I couldn't believe it," said Benioff. "When we got the email about it the next day, I honestly thought someone was pranking us, because there had been things before where people were like, 'Oh, look at that plane in the background!' and somebody had Photoshopped it in."
"I thought, 'There's no way there's a coffee cup in there.' Then when I saw it on the TV I was like, 'How did I not see that?' " he recalled.
Weiss added, "I'd seen that shot one thousand times, and we're always looking at their faces or how the shot sat with the shots on either side of it. I felt like we were the participants in a psychology experiment, like where you don't see the gorillas running around in the background because you're counting the basketballs."
"Every production that's ever existed had things like this. You can see a crew member in Braveheart; there's an actor wearing a wristwatch in Spartacus," he continued. "But now people can rewind things and everybody is talking to each other in real time. So one person saw the coffee cup, rewound it, and then everybody did."
Speculation swirled as to who left the cup in the frame, until last October (19) when actress Emilia Clarke revealed Conleth Hill, who played Lord Varys, confessed he was responsible for the mistake.
