Got five minutes? Let Jason Momoa tell you a story. It’s the story of how, for season 1, episode 8 of Game of Thrones, the actor went to showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss with an idea: give Khal Drogo a fight sequence. In one of the first big changes from George R.R. Martin’s books, a disgruntled member of Drogo’s khalasar grew rebellious when Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) prevented him from reaping the spoils of war. The Dothraki warlord put this guy in his place by ripping out his tongue through his throat. Nasty stuff. Ahead of Thrones’ highly anticipated eighth and final season, Momoa walks us through that memorable scene. The prop he took home as a souvenir is also very Jason Momoa.
JASON MOMOA: I’m doing that scene [in “The Pointy End”] where I cut the guy’s throat and I pull the guy’s tongue out. He’s actually my stunt double from Conan [the Barbarian], who doesn’t speak English, but I had to teach him to speak Dothraki. He spoke Bulgarian. It was challenging. The director was like, “You hired him, you gotta teach him.”
My daughter was with me on set. I love taking [my kids] everywhere, but I’m covered in blood, and she’s sitting there knitting with the wardrobe department. She’s so cute. I’m like, “Hi, baby!” [She’s like,] “I love you, Papa!” Then I’d go and be like, “Raaa!” She was, like, 4 years old. “Papa’s just playing” — not fazed by it at all. It was a very memorable moment.
I’m a big fan of taking the things that I worked with. So I have the souvenir of the tongue and the throat. That’s just on my desk. I called up Dan and David. I think it was one of the first scenes that was never in the book, and George called me out on it, I think while we were doing the [Comic-Con] panel.
I always wanted to see [Drogo] go to battle. I didn’t want to do some elaborate fight scene. I think it’s [just as] intimidating to whisper in someone’s ear and go, “Stop that.” You can just parry; I don’t need to do any fight moves. Then you just take the guy’s sword and slice his throat out. I was like, “We can get a chicken breast, and we’ll just cover my hand in blood, and that’ll do it.” And then within days they had this f—ing throat and tongue attachment, and it looked amazing.
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