A year-and-a-half after it was inadvertently revealed that there was a Starbucks franchise in or around Winterfell, the creators of Game of Thrones are still perplexed by how exactly the fuck that happened.
We know this because The Hollywood Reporter got access to an exclusive excerpt for the book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon (which comes out Tuesday), and in that excerpt David Benioff and Dan Weiss weighed in on how a coffee cup made an unexpected cameo that slipped past everyone while filming/editing the episode "The Last of the Starks" from the show's final season.
For those in need of a reminder, Twitter makes it easy:
"I couldn’t believe it," Benioff says in the book. "When we got the email about it the next day, I honestly thought someone was pranking us, because there had been things before where people were like, 'Oh, look at that plane in the background!' and somebody had Photoshopped it in. I thought, 'There’s no way there’s a coffee cup in there.' Then when I saw it on the TV I was like, 'How did I not see that?'”
Weiss added to that by saying that the obsession with nailing the scene led the obvious to be overlooked.
"I’d seen that shot one thousand times and we’re always looking at their faces or how the shot sat with the shots on either side of it," Weiss said. "I felt like we were the participants in a psychology experiment, like where you don’t see the gorillas running around in the background because you’re counting the basketballs. Every production that’s ever existed had things like this. You can see a crew member in Braveheart; there’s an actor wearing a wristwatch in Spartacus. But now people can rewind things and everybody is talking to each other in real time. So one person saw the coffee cup, rewound it, and then everybody did."
These comments are similar to ones made back in 2019 by the same duo. In fact, last August, Benioff said: "We're concentrating so much on Daenerys and Jon Snow, that we just didn't see this coffee cup right in the middle. At first I couldn't believe it, and then it was kind of embarrassment because...how do we not see this coffee cup in the middle of this shot? And then eventually it was just kind of funny, because it's...this one is just a mistake, and it's kind of funny to us now."
While modern technology allowed eagle-eyed viewers to shit on the screw-up in real time via memes, it also allowed for the gaffe to be scrubbed from the episode's re-runs. Feel free to note that Season 8 had its share of issues regardless, like these people did:
Anyway, you can buy the book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, which fancies itself as the "official untold story of the epic series," on Oct. 6.
