Game of Thrones Should Thank Fans For Its Most Iconic Casting
GoT's fandom is iconic.
Jason Momoa as Khal Drogo offered one of the most memorable performances on Game of Thrones, even though it lasted for only one season.
But what if we told you that the series has to thank the fans of George Martin 's books, who speculated about what actors would be best suited to play the book characters before the TV series was even in the works, for it?
Indeed, as one of Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff confirmed during a Q&A session that he and D.B. Weiss held at Austin Film Festival in 2019, the showrunners went to fan casting pages, before the filming of the series started, and that was how they found Jason Momoa.
The fans certainly were not disappointed in their choice.
To this day Jason Momoa remains one of the most appreciated actors of Game of Thrones, and his subsequent career is also among the most successful, compared to his fellow castmembers, with him playing the titular superhero in Aquaman and its upcoming sequel, as well as Duncan Idaho in Denis Villeneuve's Dune.
Perhaps as a side effect of the showrunners casting actors primarily for their visual similarity with book characters, actors with secondary roles on Game of Thrones, such as Momoa or Pedro Pascal ( Oberyn Martell) often had more talent than primary stars.
You can hardly find a complaint about any aspect of his performance as Khal Drogo on the web, which is an achievement in itself.
In fact, people going into Game of Thrones blind sometimes get surprised that Drogo is only a secondary character, who dies relatively early, rather than one of the main characters.
All in all, this whole story is an example of fans getting exactly what they wanted and loving it. With a result like this, we can hope that more showrunners would pay attention to fan casting ideas in the future.