If you sat down to watch this past Sunday's episode of Game of Thrones, you may have been slightly-to-extremely nauseated by the scene of Samwell Tarly cleaning out the bedpans, especially if you were chowing down on a late dinner at the time.
Here it is on a ten-minute loop if you're so inclined.
Well, as it turns out, that particularly putrid footage took five full days, and roughly 50-60 hours, to complete for the season premiere. We know that because the actor who plays Sam (John Bradley) sat down with the Hollywood Reporter and told them exactly that. So feel free to drop that nugget in casual conversation with fellow GoT fans.
From the interview:
![Arya Stark in 'Game of Thrones.'](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 203 115"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
The premiere finds Samwell Tarly stuck in a sticky situation, so to speak. What was involved in filming that gross montage?
It was quite a long time shooting it. It was shot over a period of about five full days. We're talking about 50 or 60 hours of shooting all of that. It was quite an experience, really. For the first time in my career on the show, I was completely alone. It was weird to be working so closely with the director and shooting that sequence in these five second bursts. It was kind of strange, just making sure you got those tiny little microscopic five second moments in the can, and then hand it over to the editors to stitch it into the montage that it became. I had no vision of what it might look like, no expectations of what it might look like. When I saw it at the screening [in Los Angeles], that was the first time I had seen it. It was kind of extraordinary, the fact that they could take these tiny fragments and build it into a narrative.
Bradley also reveals that they didn't use real shit—which is good to know—but instead used fruit cake, which may or may not stop you from ever eating that again:
"We didn't use real human waste. It was one step down on the unpleasantness scale. We used wet fruit cake, for all of the... I don't know you say it politely. (Laughs.) That was wet fruit cake. It smelled fine, but shooting under lights for 13 hours or so, it can get a little nasty. I was reminded last night that while I was shooting that scene, everybody else on the cast was at the Emmys [in 2016]."
There are several more questions for Bradley, both poop- and non-poop related. Go check it out for yourself (or don't, kind of depends on how much poop trivia you need in your life) over at THR when you get a minute.