We need to know what Mother thinks of this. Spilling some (limited) intel on a requisite late-night stop this week, Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss told Jimmy Kimmel an amusing anecdote about the show’s most recent “The Long Night” episode, which by all means sounded like 55 days of hell to shoot — and that was just for the Battle of Winterfell sequence. The non-stop shooting schedule wound up affecting the psyche of Grey Worm actor Jacob Anderson, usually a sharp High Valyrian improvisor, when it came to a battle scene that required some loud, spontaneous dialogue. The only thing he could muster up was … not exactly relevant to Winterfell’s problems.
“At one point, the director starts yelling at Jacob to improvise something in Valyrian, yell to your troops in Valyrian,” Weiss explained. “And Jacob was so tired and so delirious and so out of it that all he could think to yell was, ‘Mike Pence! Mike Pence! Mike Pence!’ So in one of those scenes when Jacob is yelling and pointing — whatever he was saying was dubbed over — but what he was actually saying was ‘Mike Pence! Mike Pence!’” It would’ve been impossible for viewers to know what Anderson was actually mouthing in the scene, even before post-production dubbed something else in, as Weiss noted the character was wearing a face mask. Still: You have to laugh.
