In case you haven’t noticed over the past few days, something huge happened on last week’s episode of Game of Thrones, Home, which fans can’t stop talking about. While we still have to wait a few more days to see how these shocking revelations will alter the course of this season, with the episode Oathbreaker airing on May 8, new details about that scene are starting to come out. Star Carice Van Houten (Melisandre) offered plenty of information about this scene, but be warned, if you haven’t watched Home yet, there will be MASSIVE SPOILERS below, so read on at your own risk.
Before Season 6 debuted, HBO made the decision to not offer press members advanced episodes for review purposes, which many attributed to the fact that the first four episodes leaked just days before the premiere last year. After watching Home, a more likely rationale is the network didn’t want to risk any chance of the show’s biggest secret getting out early, that Jon Snow (Kit Harington) has indeed come back from the dead, in the same way that many fans had predicted, through the red priestess Melisandre. After being coaxed into testing out her resurrection powers on Jon Snow by Davos Seaworth (Liam Cunningham), Melisandre performed a ritual that included washing Jon Snow’s naked body. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Carice Van Houten reveals she had to wash Jon Snow’s (Kit Harington)’s corpse at least 50 times on set.
“It took forever to resurrect Jon Snow, forever! It was such an important scene, we shot it from so many angles. I think I washed his body 50 times. There would be a lot of people who would be very jealous, including my mother and sister. I was joking about that with him – ‘if only my mother could see this’ – and he loved that.”
In the Season 5 finale, Mother’s Mercy, Jon Snow was killed in a rather heinous fashion, stabbed numerous times by Aliser Thorne (Owen Teale) and his treacherous followers in the Night’s Watch. Jon Snow was featured in the Season 6 premiere, as his corpse was guarded by Davos, Dolorous Edd (Ben Crompton) and others who were loyal to their former Lord Commander, before he was brought back to life in Home. The episode marked quite the change of pace for Kit Harington, who compared the scene to a “teenage boy’s wet dream.”
“It was such an easy two two episodes, I loved it. I’m in a warm room, which is unusual for me. (It was) very weird, like a teenage boy’s wet dream – you’re laying there naked and Carice van Houten is washing you.”
Earlier this week, Kit Harington revealed that he first learned about Jon Snow’s death in the summer of 2014, when the Season 5 scripts first went out. He was informed two weeks later that series creators/showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had planned on resurrecting him, although he had to keep that information a secret, even from his own castmates. By the time the scripts had gone out for Season 6 last summer, many cast members knew he was coming back. Carice Van Houten revealed that she too was fooled by this ruse, thinking that Jon Snow wasn’t coming back.
“I had thought for a long time he was just going to die. Then we got wind he was probably going to come back but nobody was sure about it. It’s funny because on Twitter when he died a lot of people who wanted to kill me in episode 9 [when Melisandre orchestrated the murder of Shireen] came back and said, ‘We’ll forgive you if you resurrect Jon Snow.'”
Director Jeremy Podeswa, who directed the first two episodes of Season 6, praised Kit Harington‘s patience in both the premiere, The Red Woman and last week’s Home, since he had to play dead for nearly a full week of shooting. As for what’s in store next for Jon Snow, it was teased in the Oathbreaker preview that several members of the Night’s Watch and the Wildlings, who returned in timely fashion with Dolorous Edd last week, think that Jon Snow is a “God” for coming back from the dead. Stay tuned for more on Game of Thrones as the countdown continues towards Sunday night’s new episode.