John Bradley says the Battle of Winterfell was a "tough moment to film" for ‘Game of Thrones’.
The 30-year-old actor plays Samwell Tarly in the HBO fantasy drama and he has revealed that he received a note from the episode’s director, Miguel Sapochnik, asking him to take the "fight" out of his character, which became the most "memorable moment" on the "entire show", and the set was very "eerie" because his alter ego was surrounded by "dead human dummies".
He told Esquire: "He [Miguel] said, ‘it’s just going to be you and a stack of bodies, and I want you to get across in this shot that this is Sam thinking for the first time in this battle that he’s not going to survive this. This is the moment where all the fight goes out of your character.
"That was a really tough moment to film. We had been filming for a long time and we felt like it had really been starting to take its toll on us. We felt battle scared. I was leaning against bodies of people who presumably Sam had known. They were just stuffed dummies, but it was really an eerie moment, because you’re looking at dead human faces and hands, and it can have a visceral effect on you. It felt when I was filming that moment that it might be the most memorable moment in my entire time on this show."
And John wasn’t aware how crucial his role was going to be because he has grown in "bravery" and knowledge over the drama’s eight seasons.
He added: "I didn’t know how pivotal he was gonna become and I think that’s a good thing, because it’s a three-way kind of attack of surprise: the audience discovers how brave and worthwhile this character is over the course of the next eight seasons; I discovered it as an actor just how much this character is growing; and the character discovers it about himself."
The ‘Patient Zero’ star also opened up about how his character is needed in the show because Samwell represents "most men" and their vulnerabilities, compared to Jon Snow (Kit Harington).
He continued: "You need a character like Sam to represent the man on the street, because then that contextualises all of the threats and all of the stakes. You need a Sam for Jon Snow to make sense. In order for Jon Snow to appear above and beyond the regular guy, you need to see the regular guy. And as much as a lot of men don’t like to admit it … Sam’s coping with it is probably how they cope with it.
"A lot of men probably want to think on some level that all men are like Jon Snow. They wanna think that a man is a man and a man will stand up for what he does. And a man will come out of the traps and do the job, but that’s not like most men that I know. Most men that I know are vulnerable a lot of the time and scared and some people don’t like to see that represented because it takes away from their fantasy of what they are and what a man should be."
John Bradley says the Battle of Winterfell was ‘tough moment to film’
