‘Game Of Thrones’ Showrunners Threaten To Blackmail Kit Harington With The Unseen Pilot

The original Game of Thrones pilot, the one that was shot and eventually scrapped for the actual first episode “Winter Is Coming,” was a “complete piece of shit.” That’s according to screenwriter Craig Mazin, who offered his pals, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, some helpful advice after viewing the episode: “You have a MASSIVE PROBLEM.” Approximately 90 percent of the pilot was reshot, and many characters, including Daenerys Targaryen and Catelyn Stark, were recast. Obviously this story has a happy ending (Mazin called the actual premiere “the biggest rescue in Hollywood history”), but the episode is somewhere out there, waiting to be seen and cringed at.

“[Weiss and Benioff] made a lot of mistakes. It didn’t look right, didn’t feel right, had nothing different about it,” Harington recently told the Guardian about the pilot (in which he’s clean-shaven and wears a wig).

The Emmy-nominated actor, who auditioned to play Jon Snow because “it was HBO, and it was American television, so it felt like a huge deal,” still hasn’t seen the episode, but he’s aware that his bosses own a copy. “They say, if I ever piss them off too much,” Harington said, “they’ll release it on YouTube. Every now and then, they send me a screengrab, just as a threat.”