Bringing Jon Snow back from the dead required a lot more work than the simple routine that you saw in Sunday's episode, "Home."
Carice van Houten, who plays Melisandre on "Game of Thrones," said that the resurrection scene was very intense to shoot and that director Jeremy Podeswa shot the scene over and over for hours to get it just right.
"It took forever to resurrect him, forever!" van Houten said in a recent interview. "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."
Actor Kit Harington didn't mind being a corpse for the last two episodes. In fact, he welcomed the change from his usual stunt-heavy work in freezing cold temperatures. "It was such an easy two episodes, I loved it," Harington said. "I'm in a warm room, which is unusual for me."
He did, however, note the awkwardness of the long shoot, calling it "very weird, like a teenage boy's wet dream - you're laying there naked and Carice van Houten is washing you." Oh Jon, you truly know nothing.
Podeswa praised Harington for playing dead over the last two weeks without complaint. "Kit's fantastic in so many ways, he's a wonder actor and wonderful person and was really patient," he said. "He was great pretending to be dead and really gracious."
Though fans of the show long expected Jon Snow to return, Harington's cast mates weren't so sure. The actor had told everyone that he wasn't coming back, and they had naturally assumed that he was telling the truth.
"I had thought for a long time he was just going to die," van Houten said. "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 dies a lot of people who wanted to kill me in episode 9 [when Melisandre murdered Shireen] came back and said, 'We'll forgive you if you resurrect Jon Snow.'"
"Game of Thrones" airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.
Follow Brandon Katz at @Great_Katzby
