Years before she had a main role on Ted Lasso, actress Hannah Waddingham was cashing a paycheck to play religious fanatic Septa Unella on Game of Thrones. She recalled a particularly shitty experience of her days on the latter, bringing up the filming of a torture sequence in which she claims she was “waterboarded” for 10 hours as they tried to get the scene just right. The comments were made on Collider Ladies Night, which you can check out at the bottom.
Waddingham says the original scene was supposed to depict Unella being raped by the Mountain, but she says that negative audience feedback from a previous rape scene might’ve been the driver behind changing things (a lot) at the last moment.
“I think they’d had so many complaints about the rape of Sansa that they chose not to go with it,” she said. “Unbelievably, they changed it quite at the last minute. I think they possibly changed it when I was mid-air flying to Belfast because suddenly I got sent these new sides that said I would need a wetsuit top. I thought they’d sent me the wrong bits.”
That assumption was incorrect. Turns out it was decided they’d be going with an old CIA favorite.
“They were like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be waterboarding instead,’” she continued. “And I was like, ‘But we’re not actually doing waterboarding.’ And they were like, ‘No, no, no, we are.’”
She says she was “strapped” to a wooden table for 10 hours as Cersei (played by Lena Headey) poured wine on her. She said that it was the worst day of her life “other than [giving] childbirth.”
“Lena was uncomfortable pouring liquid in my face for that long, and I was beside myself,” Waddingham said. “But in those moments, you go, ‘Do you serve the piece and get on with it?’ Or do you chicken out and go, ‘This isn’t what I signed up for.’”
She says that when she got back to the hotel she wasn’t able to talk above a whisper and that she also had “bruises already coming up like I’d been attacked.”
As for long-term effects, Waddingham claims doing the scene “gave me claustrophobia around water.” She also says it was all for about “one minute and 37 seconds” of actual aired footage. Dang.
The whole experience was deemed necessary to make the scene as authentic as possible.
“I didn’t want the strap tight around my neck, but as [the production team] pointed out if the camera can see you lifting your head up to save yourself, that’s not authentic,” she explained. “As [GOT co-creator] Dan Weiss pointed out, he came up and said, ‘Look, in the script it says Cersei empties the remainder of her glass of red wine to wake up Unella. People aren’t going to think that’s enough. That is not enough retribution for Cersei. It needs to be three-quarters full or so — if we can cheat it, even more — of a carafe of wine.’ The one thing I kept thinking to myself was the production company aren’t going to let you die, so get on with it, be uncomfortable.”
Watch her speak about it in more detail below:
