It’s not hard to picture members of the Night’s Watch psyching themselves up to fight wildings and monsters with a little bit of Anthrax’s “Deathrider,” so who better to show how a White Walker becomes reality than the band’s own Scott Ian? The legendary thrash metal guitarist went behind the scenes with Game of Thrones‘ makeup artists for his Bloodworks series and eventually became a member of the most metal mythical creatures in Westeros.
Ian interviewed GoT makeup artist Barrie Gower about how a person gets turned into a White Walker and the painstaking amount of detail that goes into each individual fighter in the battle from “Hardhome.” Even after being involved in it, Gower couldn’t believe that “Hardhome” actually worked while watching it from the sidelines.
“There were hundreds and hundreds of extras on set and it was a huge, great big set that they built in Belfast. But the scale of it itself was just like…there was just people running everywhere all over the place,” Gower said. “Just standing on the sidelines, just watching, you’re just thinking…’How the hell could they be getting anything from this?’ But you sort of step to one side and look at what’s on the monitor and it’s just beautiful.”
After that, Ian gets the full White Walker treatment complete with prosthetics, costuming, and schloera contacts. Check it out up top.
