Last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live featured the hosting talents of Emmy winner and Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage. Since Game of Thrones is such a hugely popular TV show, fans of the series were eager to see how many references SNL would put into the episode, as well as how funny said references would be. Commercials featured the infamous Jon Snow question, he did a digital short with Leslie Jones where she calls him Tyrion, but no other bit quite compares to the full nerd-ness of this fake behind the scenes video. Check it out.
Pretty great, right? SNL did Game of Thrones right with this sketch, which had a lot contributing to its awesomeness.
The sketch opens up like the multitude of HBO’ Game of Thrones sneak peeks have done before. We see camera equipment being set up, and some (probably) Bolton forces entering Winterfell before settling on a shot of Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke on set. Of course, Emilia Clarke was in fact SNL regular and overall comedic genius Kate McKinnon. McKinnon’s impression of Clarke was so spot on that I would loved the entire sketch to be the two of them talking to the camera about Season 6 of Game of Thrones.
From there, things get more awkward when the focus of the faux BTS video begins shifting from Peter Dinklage and Emilia Clarke to the man helping to portray Daenarys’ largest dragon, Drogon. The stand-in, played by the hilarious Bobby Moynihan, is wearing a skin-tight suit typically used for motion capture projects (we most recently saw Lupita Nyong’o in a similar getup filming The Force Awakens). Moynihan is also wearing a dragon head as a hat, giving Dinklage a face to look at when he has scenes with the dragon.
After introducing Bobby Moynihan’s stand-in character, we see the actor slowly unraveling and becoming harder and harder to work with. Moynihan begins ad-libbing while the other actors are filming serious scenes. When Jorah Mormont says the word “game” he simply can’t help but chime in and add “of thrones” to the take. Additionally, Peter Dinklage finds it impossible to get through a scene with the dragon head as the stand-in looks on, resulting in Bobby Moynihan having to close his eyes as Dinklage recites his lines.
Things get even worse when Bobby Moynihan is scene drinking what appears to be a Starbucks refresher while in his motion capture suit. Quickly thereafter, it appears that nature is calling and Moynihan requests a potty break. Unfortunately, the director denied this request as it takes a significant amount of time to get him in and out of the suit. This appears to not go well, as “Emilia Clarke” is getting another interview as the wardrobe department attempts to blow dry the apparent pee stains from the motion capture suit, with the stand-in still wearing it.
This was definitely one of the highlights of last night’s Saturday Night Live. While the video would have stood well on its own with just Peter Dinklage and Bobby Moynihan, the spot-on impressions of the other Game of Thrones actors made it even better.
Saturday Night Live airs, you guessed it, Saturdays on NBC. Game of Thrones will make its return to HBO on April 24th.
