One GoT Death Was So Gruesome, The Producers Chickened Out from Airing It

The show did not shy away from a man having his eyes gouged out and his head squashed like an overripe fruit, a pregnant woman getting stabbed repeatedly, and a lot of people getting gruesomely torn apart by zombies, never mind your usual brutal hand-to-hand medieval fighting.

But there was one death in it, which the showrunners did not dare to film according to their initial cruel idea.

In Season 5 Myrcella Baratheon (actually the daughter of Cersei and Jaime Lannister) got poisoned. But unlike some other deaths from poison on the show, her death scene was so subdued, that the audience was, for a time, guessing whether she had actually died – she simply got a nosebleed and collapsed into Jaime's arms.

But as the actress who played her, Nell Tiger Free, revealed in an interview with MYM Buzz she gave back in 2017, initially Myrcella's end was supposed to be far more brutal:

"I don't know if I should say this, but originally what happened is they gave me those mashed up bananas with like blood, fake blood, and my brains were supposed to be all over the ship and stuff."

So the poison which killed her was originally supposed to work even more violently than the poison which caused Joffrey's agonizing death in Season 4.

While Myrcella was not a monstrous villain, like Joffrey, such considerations never stopped either George Martin or the showrunners (the specific examples above, if you remember, were deaths of sympathetic characters).

But they've decided against making Myrcella's death horrific at the last moment, for thematic reasons. They wanted her death to reflect her life.

"[They] wanted it to be sweet," as Nell explained. "Which is rare for [Game Of] Thrones."

You don't say. Of course Game of Thrones positions itself as a story which takes place in a brutal and uncaring world, where common fantasy tropes offer no protection to good guys, fortunes often appear arbitrary and good intentions still can result in a horrible end.

But as this interview showcases, even its writers are not immune to the more common narrative conventions.