The unaired “Game of Thrones” pilot is the stuff of legend among fans of D.B. Weiss and David Benioff’s HBO fantasy epic — for being epically bad. And though it has not been released, the reason diehard “GoT” buffs know it’s so bad is because the creators and cast have publicly revealed just how horrible this 2009 project was.
It’s so terrible, in fact, star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is surprised “Game of Thrones” was ever picked up to series at all.
“There was this pilot that was — 95% was reshot [later],” Coster-Waldau told James Corden on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.” “And we sat down, the original cast with Dan and David — the two creators — and they showed this thing to us and it was unbelievably bad. It was absolutely amazing to see.”
Coster-Waldau said the original episode was so terrible that “there’s no reason we’re sitting here talking about this today, no one should have picked that up.”
“But there was one guy, Richard Plepler, who was the CEO of HBO, who was like apparently the only one who went like, ‘This is great! Let’s do it!’ And then we did it, and we reshot,” he added. “But it just goes to so you, you really, you never know.”
“Game of Thrones” Season 8 premieres Sunday at 9/8c on HBO.