The Only GoT Scene Even Martin Struggled With: "It Was Like Murdering Your Children"
The Red Wedding episode is one of the most shocking and memorable moments, not only in Game of Thrones but in the history of TV. It even shocked viewers who had already read what happened in A Storm of Swords.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, George RR Martin, along with others involved in creating the Red Wedding scene explained how they did so.
During the interview, Martin described how he likes to keep his fiction "unpredictable". And, unfortunately for Robb, the next predictable thing was to expect Ned Stark's eldest son to rise up and avenge his father. Therefore, Martin had to kill him.
He didn't want to. But he knew he had to. "It was the hardest scene I've ever had to write," Martin said. "It's two-thirds of the way through the book, but I skipped over it when I came to it. So, the entire book was done and there was still that one chapter left. Then I wrote it. It was like murdering two of your children."
The actor who played Robb Stark (Richard Madden) wasn't one of those who had read A Storm of Swords. But he was informed by what he described as "about a thousand people" about how his character's time in the show would end, that he found it necessary to Google it and find out.
The scene was not entirely faithful to A Storm of Swords. In the book series, Robb was not married to Talisa (played by Oona Chaplin). However, in the show, she was selected as Robb's major love interest who would be the reason he broke his vow to Walder Frey and set in motion a chain of events that would destroy his family.
The iconic scene took five days to shoot as it was necessary to make viewers believe everything was calm in order for the brutal ending to have maximum impact.
In it, to all intents and purposes, Walder Frey has forgiven Robb and things are just dandy between the two of them. It's a wedding. It's a party. Everyone's enjoying themselves. Then the door is closed. An air of uncertainty creeps in.
When we see that Lord Bolton has armour on underneath his clothes, it starts to become obvious that all is not well.
Then the violence is unleashed.
Even the actors cried while filming, with Chaplin reminded by the director that she really needed to stop crying as her character was, at this point, dead.
It's easy to see why George RR Martin didn't want to write the scene. But it certainly fits his brief unpredictability. And it led to a scene that nobody who watched will ever forget.