NY Daily News Introduces Game of Thrones Advent Calendar

We’re under the one month mark until the premiere of Season 5, and everyone is getting into the excitement. The New York Daily News has started a Daily Advent Calendar, treating the start of the show like a sort of gruesome dragon filled Ten Weeks of Christmas, complete with countdown clock.

Check out some of the interactive specials they’ve given us so far, below.

Day One begins at the beginning…

…which for many was the moment when Game of Thrones did the thing that standard fantasy sword and sorcery shows don’t do. They killed off the supposed central hero of the piece, the man played by the actor whose face was on the side of the bus. Nothing like jumping right in!

Day Two has an exclusive photo from Season 5, plus some Emilia Clarke factoids: Long before she was acting with dragons, Emilia Clarke was knocking ‘em dead in school plays. Her first acting gig came when she was just 4 years old at the Rye St. Antony School in Headington, Oxford, England. Although the details are lost to time, Clarke appeared in a production centered around the 17th-century military and political leader Oliver Cromwell. “She was always talking, she always wanted to act,” her mom Jenny Clarke told the Daily News.

Day Three: Facts about Nathalie Emmanuel who plays Missendei. She reveals she’s letting go of her emotions more in Season 5, and has to make herself cry on camera: “I express myself a lot with music,” says Emmanuel. “I use it to bring forth an emotion, so with scenes where I have to cry, I listen to this music between takes. You have to understand, that it’s hard to cry on camera. Sometimes you have to bring that emotion a lot when there are lots of takes and it can be quite challenging – you just dry up completely. No more tears.”

Day Four: Turns out the Iron Thrones is super uncomfortable. I fail to be surprised. Didn’t Maester Luwin tell Bran ruling was supposed to be uncomfortable? On the show, the Iron Throne was constructed by Aegon I Targaryen, the first king of the Seven Kingdoms. He made it from the swords surrendered by his enemies. Legend has it, it’s made of a thousand swords that took 59 days to hammer out into a throne. In the books, the arcane armchair is huge, unsymmetrical and so big that a king is forced to climb a slew of ladder-like rungs made out of swords to reach the seat. In real life, the prop is made out of fiberglass and sits inside the Paint Hall, one of the largest television studios in Europe that once was used as a place to paint ocean liners like the HMS Titanic. 

Day Five: The Two Daarios situation. While not as jarring or dire as the Two Darrins on Bewitched or as silly as the Two Beckys on Roseanne, it is still the only time the show has recast an adult actor so blatantly. Apparently Michiel Huisman (Daario Two) is determined to remain our forever Daario. Huisman practiced spinning knives so much it became something of a hobby. “When I went home and read that in the script, I decided to take every opportunity I’ve had since then to twirl knives and learn new tricks,” Huisman told The Daily News. “When we’ve been on the set or taking breaks while other people would go and smoke cigarettes, I’d twirl knives.” He says it’s for that scene in Season 4, but I’m willing to bet it’s also a good trick in case one of the producers decides to come up to him with bad news…

Today, the Advent Calendar discussed the last bastion of civilization to the North, Castle Black. The set is unique in that it is a complete structure; typically the buildings seen on TV or the movies are a façade, a fraction of what they would be in real life. This one is different. Its many rooms are used in various scenes and a camera can do a 360-shot of the fortress in just one take because the structure is so complete – even down to the spider webs that dangle from the corners and sway in the breeze.

Want to see what the Advent Calendar has in store for the next 25 days? The link to it is here.

• Published on 03/18/2015 at 9:30 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:06 PM CDT