Recently, we told you about Game of Thrones‘ wildest stunt: A sequence in season five’s “The Dance of Dragons” which saw Dany’s dragon Drogon — or at least a ginormous flamethrower representing him — toast 20 people. But apparently the upcoming seventh season of the show has already topped that, naturally with even more fire.
This is presumably what everyone on set feels like while all this fire is spewing around.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, showrunner David Benioff teased that a scene in season seven (presumably the one we’ve seen hinted at in the trailer, as well as in released images of Daenerys taking to the field atop Drogon in a battle between her forces and the Lannisters) takes the sadly-not-included-in-the-Guinness-book world record of “most people roasted on a TV set simultaneously”:
In one battle scene we set more stuntmen on fire than have ever been simultaneously set on fire. Our stunt coordinator really wanted to get in the Guinness Book of World Records for this.
According to Thrones stunt co-ordinator Rowley Irlam, what made the this sequence more impressively fiery than the one in season five was the number of stuntpeople — once again, 20 — being encased in protective fire resistant gear and smeared with a cooling gel before were being doused in flames simultaneously, as well as the actual amount of fire being used, making what is already an incredibly challenging stunt even harder to perform:
One sequence has 73 fire burns and that itself is a record. No film or TV show has ever done that in a whole show, let alone in one sequence. We also set 20 people on fire at one time, which is also a record. I think in Saving Private Ryan they had 13 on a beach, and on Braveheart they had 18 partial burns. Because of the nature of our attacking animals, we had the liberty to expand on that.
How hard? “Don’t breathe in or you’ll sear your own airways” hard, according to Irlam:
It’s totally different from going underwater in your bathtub and counting the seconds in your head. If somebody bumps you and you breathe in by accident you will breathe in flame.
Crikey. Well, with Dany now in Westeros and on the march toward the Iron Throne, maybe we can expect an even bigger inferno to be cooked up in the show’s final season.
[EW]