As Game of Thrones fans may recall, there’s a scene in the tenth episode of the first season where Joffrey takes Sansa Stark to see the head of her father on a spike after he’d been beheaded. Along with Ned’s, there are several heads on spikes in the scene, and one of them — which apparently hardly anyone noticed until iO9 pointed it out yesterday — bears the likeness of former President George W. Bush.
Now, it should be pointed out that the show’s creators/producers made no effort to hide this. In fact, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss point it out in the DVD commentary, explaining that for such scenes they use heads that are already available from their props supplier rather than having new ones made …
“The last head on the left is George Bush. George Bush’s head appears in a couple of beheading scenes. It’s not a choice, it’s not a political statement. We just had to use whatever head we had around.”
See, they “just had to use whatever head we had around” and it just so happened that THEY HAD A GEORGE W. BUSH HEAD handy?! PERFECTLY REASONABLE! Of course that hasn’t stopped an uproar from breaking out over the whole thing.
In response to the uproar, Benioff and Weiss explained further…
We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.
In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.
Additionally, HBO issued the following statement last night…
We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.
Here’s the scene in question with Benioff and Weiss’ commentary from the DVD…
Surely the explanation given by Benioff and Weiss is pure bullshit and surely conservative talking heads will call for a boycott of the show but HAHAHAHA good luck with that!