Hannah Waddingham appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to promote The Fall Guy… and to talk about being waterboarded on Game of Thrones.
The Ted Lasso star spoke about doing her own stunts in the upcoming movie, starring Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling. Colbert then asked her if she had done them as well when she was on the hit HBO show.
Hannah Waddingham’s Game of Thrones waterboarding
Waddingham played Septa Unella, a member of the Faith of the Seven, who tortured Lena Heady’s Cersei Lannister. If you need your memory jogged, Unella was the one who chanted, “Shame, shame,” as Cersei walked on the streets of King’s Landing naked.
When Cersei returned to power, she exacts her revenge on Waddingham’s character. She imprisons her and tortures her by pouring wine over her face as she was lying on a table, essentially waterboarding her.
She told Colbert, “Thrones gave me something I wasn’t expecting from it, which was chronic claustrophobia.”
“It was horrific. Ten hours of being actually waterboarded. … Like actually. I’m strapped to a table with all these leather straps. I couldn’t life up my head because I said that would be too obvious that it’s loose,” she continued.
Waddingham said that when she left the set, her hair turned purple due to the grape juice that substituted the wine. She also still couldn’t speak since the Gregor Clegane, the Mountain, had covered her mouth with his hand as she screamed.
“I had strap marks everywhere like I had been attacked,” the actress added.
“One of the other guys who had been shooting something else was like, ‘What has happened to you?'” she continued.
“And I told him everything, and he went, ‘You’re lucky. I’ve just been crawling through s**t on my elbow for four days.’ And we were laughing about how both of us are in Game of Thrones, and it kind of doesn’t matter when you’re in Thrones. You just want to give the best,” Waddingham explained.
What is SERE?
It’s a little disconcerting how the actress described the scene. While I had seen that scene and felt sympathy for her character (even though she was awful, but played wonderfully by the Emmy winning Waddingham), I honestly thought it was faked.
You see, waterboarding has been banned from the US military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training program since 2007. According to the Huffington Post, it was banned by the military “because it was too brutal.” For years, it had been used as a training tool for American troops so that they can “resist interrogation if captured.”
According to How Stuff Works, not even one Navy SEAL passed the waterboarding part of the test; they all broke during interrogation. One of the reasons it was banned was that it demoralized those in training.
So imagine an actress going through that just for the sake of the scene. Talk about suffering for one’s art.
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