If you’re in charge of horses on Game of Thrones, the first five seasons were so boring: The horses just stood around and looked pretty and never did anything cool. Luckily, horse mistress Camilla Naprous’s job got slightly more exciting this year, as the gigantic “Battle of the Bastards†kicked off with a cavalry charge against poor Jon Snow, and only got more intense from there. As this week’s “Inside the Episode†segment reveals, the production used a whopping 80 horses to make the battle come to life — and 40 of them really did run at full speed toward Kit Harington. (He says it was “really scary.â€) But despite the chaos onscreen, the horses were actually very tightly choreographed: They were riding through two-foot “channels†that brought them as close as possible without colliding. To shoot it all, the production had to use a special camera rig, a gigantic remote-controlled arm attached to a Range Rover. That’s not to say there wasn’t some CGI: No horses got punched by a giant in real life.
Game of Thrones Wants You to Know That Cavalry Charge Was Actually Real
