Nearly five years after “Game of Thrones” aired its final episode, Hannah Waddingham is still bearing the brunt of filming one of the series’ most intense scenes.
Appearing on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” this week to promote her new film, “The Fall Guy,” Waddingham said she still experiences “chronic claustrophobia” as the result of the Season 6 scene in which her character, Septa Unella, is tortured by Cersei (Lena Headey) and doused in the face with a jug of wine.
“There weren’t stunts, but ‘Thrones’ gave me something I wasn’t expecting from it, and that is chronic claustrophobia,” she explained. “It was horrific. [I had] 10 hours of being actually waterboarded ― like, actually waterboarded.”
Watch Hannah Waddingham’s interview on “The Late Show” below.
Waddingham recalled being “strapped to a table with all these leather straps” while shooting the scene. Her hair, dyed blond for the character, “went purple” by the end of shooting given the amount of grape juice that had been splashed on her head.
“I had strap marks all over me, like I’d been attacked,” she said. Still, she didn’t get much sympathy from fellow actor Eugene Simon, who played Lancel Lannister: “I told him everything, and he went, ‘You’re lucky. I’ve just been crawling on my elbows in shit for four days.’”
The London-born actor, whose credits also include “Sex Education” and “Ted Lasso,” previously opened up about filming the scene in a 2021 interview with Collider.
“Other than childbirth, it was the worst day of my life,” she said at the time. “You haven’t been in ‘Game of Thrones’ unless you’ve been really, really battered around.’”
In her chat with Colbert, however, Waddingham suggested she had no regrets about the amount of effort she put into “Game of Thrones,” noting that it remains without parallel as far as prestige television series are concerned.
“The reason why I don’t believe it’s touched yet, in terms of the cinematography of it for a series ... it’s just a different level. But, with that comes actual waterboarding.”