These Game of Thrones Audition Stories Will Make You Love the Cast Even More

Clarke danced for her dinner, so to speak. "It was a lot of adrenaline," she told Jimmy Fallon in 2014. "I was very nervous. It was a big-deal audition, obviously. There were lots of people from HBO there. And I was kind of anxious, and did all of the scenes, and at the end I was asking them if I could do anything else. And David Benioff [a writer on Game of Thrones] suggested I do a dance. So I did. I did the funky chicken."

In a 2014 Reddit AMA, Dinklage divulged that he wasn't so sure about the series at first: "I had one hesitation, because of the fantasy genre, I told him I didn't want a really long beard and pointy shoes, and they assured me this character and this world wasn't that. They told me about his complexity, the fact that he wasn't a hero or a villain, that he was a womanizer and a drinker, and they painted a flawed and beautiful portrait of him, so I signed on."

While speaking on a panel in 2014, Nairn revealed that he had to prove he was strong enough to play Hodor: "I got a 15-minutes notice. . . . I was at a restaurant having a lunch and my agent called me. He said, 'Well, we need to find a child . . . for you to carry' and I had to go to a 40th birthday party where there was a child. And there was a ring of 40-year-old women around me [at the audition] and I was carrying this random child who I didn't know. And they were all calling me in different directions and I was trying to demonstrate different emotions. And then I had to lift a table above my head to prove I was strong enough for the job."

During a video interview with W Magazine in 2016, Harington reflected on the McDonald's brawl that left him with a black eye: "I went into the McDonald's with this girl I was sort of dating at the time. It was late at night and there was no seats. I asked this guy and this girl he was with if we could sit at the same table at them . . . and quite quickly he starts being really rude to the girl I was with, calling her names. And we were like, 'We'll just finish our food, we don't need trouble.' And then he called her something like an ugly pig or something worse and I got up and said, 'No, no, you can't call her that, get up.' So I called him out for a fight, which I never done before, and of course, he'd been sat down the whole time. So he got up and he just kept going [up]. And I just realized that I had to at that point throw the first punch otherwise I'd look like a complete wimp. And I got battered."

"My drama teacher just threw in me with a bunch of my other friends and we all auditioned together," Turner recalled about in a 2016 podcast with The Hollywood Reporter. "I didn't know HBO, I didn't know Game of Thrones, I didn't know George R.R. Martin. She brought a ton of us up to the front of the class and was like, 'You guys are gonna audition for this because you fit the bill.' And for ages I was calling it 'The Three Kings.' We just kinda did it at lunch time and we almost forgot. We were kinda like, 'Oh my God, we have to audition.' The initial audition, I think it was just a scene that they actually cut out of the pilot. It was Sansa and Arya arguing. It was very lighthearted."

Earlier this year, Hill revealed to The Huffington Post that he auditioned for the role of King Robert Baratheon at first: "It is true, to be honest, but I have to say that I came out of the meeting, which went all right, and looked who was in after me, saw who it was, and went, 'Well, he'd be all right for it,' and he was, and he got it. You know, that's showbiz. I then read for [Lord Varys], parts of the dungeon scene with Ned and the chest scene where he explains how he was made from sort of a slave to the security of Westeros, and I think once I had already accepted the part, they said, 'How do you feel about shaving your head?'" [Editors note: Mark Addy was the actor to whom he was referring.]

"I went in and did the Haka. Do you know what that is?" Jason Momoa asked during a 2011 interview about his Game of Thrones audition. "It's a war chant. I just thought, in the scenes I was doing, you don't get a sense of what this warrior's like, what it would be like if he was commanding his officers or what he'd be like in battle. I wanted to represent that and channel a little bit of my ancestry and heritage. I'm half Hawaiian. I went into HBO and I said, 'Don't be scared or anything, but when you're in front of a large man doing the Haka, you're going to feel it. You're going to feel some energy coming at you.'"