onstage during the 70th Emmy Awards at Microsoft Theater on September 17, 2018 in Los Angeles, California.
According to showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff the original pilot episode of Game of Thrones was unforgivably bad. So bad, in fact, that despite fan demand for it, nearly none of the episode has ever seen the light of day—even on the darkest corners of the internet. Among the scenes lost on the cutting room floor is one in which A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin appears in his one and only cameo on the series, playing a guest at Daenerys Targaryen’s wedding feast. When Emilia Clarke replaced original Daenerys actress Tamzin Merchant, Martin’s footage got the axe.
Tamzin Merchant on The Tudors, Emilia Clarke on Game of Thrones
Left, Courtesy of Showtime; right, courtesy of HBO.
Nearly a decade later, Martin was offered another chance to show his bearded, Westeros-ready face in the show’s eighth and final season—but this time, the author declined the honor, claiming he was too busy working on the long-delayed The Winds of Winter. Is that the only reason why?
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Martin said: “David and Dan invited me to a cameo in one of the final episodes, which I was tempted to do. But I didn’t think just for the sake of a cameo I could take the time to return to Belfast.”
Martin is, by all reports, redoubling his efforts to complete this highly anticipated book, going so far as to hole up in a cabin to avoid distractions from the outside world. But Martin has also apparently been distancing himself from the TV series, which outpaced his writing years ago now. The last script Martin wrote for the series was for Season 4—which aired in 2014. When comparing an early draft of his script to the episode that eventually aired, it’s easy to see how far the show had already diverged from Martin’s vision.
Season 4 was also the year of an infamous sex scene between Jaime and Cersei Lannister, which played out as non-consensual on the screen—another departure from Martin’s book. “The whole dynamic is different in the show,” he said at the time. “The setting is the same, but neither character is in the same place as in the books, which may be why Dan & David played the sept out differently. But that’s just my surmise; we never discussed this scene, to the best of my recollection.”
And in 2015, when a Season 5 sexual assault on Sansa Stark sent shock waves through the fan base, Martin reiterated his hands-off stance:
There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one. And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes. David (Benioff) and Dan (Weiss) and Bryan (Cogman) and HBO are trying to make the best television series that they can. And over here I am trying to write the best novels that I can. And yes, more and more, they differ. Two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose… but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.
Martin never wrote another script for the series after Season 4, claiming, again, that he was too busy working on The Winds of Winter. “Writing a script takes me three weeks, minimum, and longer when it is not a straight adaptation from the novels. Writing a season six script would cost me a month’s work on WINDS, and maybe as much as six weeks, and I cannot afford that,” he wrote in 2015. “With David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Bryan Cogman on board, the scriptwriting chores for season six should be well covered. My energies are best devoted to WINDS.”
Martin also vanished from the annual Comic-Con panels in 2015—where he had once been a fixture—again citing his obligation to Winds. The book has yet to be published, though the has author released chapters here and there even as the show outstripped Martin. Often, those early glimpses at Winds seemed to be in direct conversation with choices Weiss and Benioff had made—especially when they decided to disregard Martin’s source material. In 2016, for example, when the series all but wiped out its Dornish characters in what was, reportedly, a late-in-the-day effort to cut free from a subplot that wasn’t working on the screen, Martin wrote on his blog: “You want to know what the Sand Snakes, Prince Doran, Areo Hotah, Ellaria Sand, Darkstar, and the rest will be up to in WINDS OF WINTER? Quite a lot, actually. The sample will give you a taste. For the rest, you will need to wait.”
Martin was similarly in dialogue with the show when he released a Sansa-centric chapter titled “Alayne” (her alter-ego at that point in the books), one month before the infamous 2015 episode “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken” showed Sansa’s traumatic wedding night. In Martin’s chapter, Sansa is safely (well, “safely”) ensconced at the Eyrie and nowhere near Winterfell, Ramsay, and his terrible dogs.
In recent years, Martin has absented himself from a number of public appearances in order to focus on his written work—like the 2018 Targaryen history Fire & Blood. He went on a mini book tour for Fire & Blood, and did some promotional work for the erstwhile SyFy series Nightflyers. But while he still shows up at the Emmy awards every year to collect his trophies for Thrones, Martin hasn’t been to a premiere of the HBO series since 2015. Perhaps he’ll show up to the April premiere for the final hurrah, even if he doesn’t have time to film a full cameo. Or perhaps, once again, he’ll be writing. As he put it in 2015:
Yes, I know that The Hollywood Reporter named me ‘the third most powerful writer in Hollywood’ last December. You would be surprised at how little that means. I cannot control what anyone else says or does, or make them stop saying or doing it, be it on the fannish or professional fronts. What I can control is what happens in my books, so I am going to return to that chapter I’ve been writing on The Winds of Winter now, thank you very much.
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This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
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