“We had tea with her,” Benioff recalls.
“Dames don’t audition for you; you audition for them.
of the show’s R-rated content.
I’ve outlived them all.
I ignored them,” and “I wonder if you’re the worst person I’ve ever met.
“My very first scene with her, I asked her to do a very minor thing.
I became a five-year-old boy.
“She had a very dry sense of humor and was aware of the parody of herself.
Sometimes I think she was mischievous to see what she could get away with.”
“She walked onto the set, and she went, ‘I’m ready now!'”
recalls Jessica Henwick, who played the whip-snapping Nymeria Sand.
She interrupted him and said, ‘Roll the cameras!’
And she just started doing her lines.
And she just stood up and she went, ‘I’m done!'”
“Now, she can’t walk fast.
She has to be helped.
She cracked me up.
I loved her.”
Rigg also had a one-on-one scene with Emilia Clarke.
“Like with Peter [Dinklage], it was watching an acting master class.
I kept thinking: “Okay, not my line yet, I’m not just watching youreally!
Are you a sheep?
You’re a dragon.
Be a dragon.”
Benioff and Weiss expanded Olenna’s role from author George R.R.
Martin’s novels to double down on Rigg’s strength as a performer.
But Olenna’s arc ended in season 7 in one of the show’s finest death scenes.
I want her to know it was me.”
Says Weiss: “Olenna was probably the only character to win her own death scene.”
