“Game Of Thrones” star, Hannah Waddingham, said she now suffers from chronic claustrophobia after being waterboarded for 10 hours while filming.
The famous actress detailed her intense experience on the April 2 episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, saying, “Thrones gave me something I wasn’t expecting from it and that is chronic claustrophobia.” She continued describing the scene. “[I had] 10 hours of being actually waterboarded, like actually waterboarded. I’m on my way back and I’m in this fancy-pants lift and my hair is already bleached to death [but] I have grape juice all in my hair so it went purple. I couldn’t speak because the Mountain had his hand over his mouth while I was screaming and I had strap marks all over me like I’d been attacked.”
The 49-year-old actress explained what she went through for the sake of the hit television series.
“So I’m strapped to a table with all these leather straps and I couldn’t lift up my head because they said that was going to be too obvious that it’s loose and I was like, ‘Right, I’d quite like them to be loose.'”
“I have talked about it since with David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the two exec producers on it, I was like, ‘Good job it’s for them because it was horrific,'” she said.
Hannah Waddingham attends the 30th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall on February 24, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Hannah Waddingham during the photocall for “Ted Lasso” Season 3 at Battersea Power Station on April 28, 2023 in London, England. Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Waddingham played Septa Unella in the hit HBO series and expressed that the show’s highly esteemed cinematography came with an incredible sacrifice on the part of the actors involved.
“The lift doors open and one of the other guys who’s been filming something else is like, ‘What happened to you?’ I told him everything and he went, ‘You’re lucky, I’ve just been crawling on my elbows in shit for four days’ … But it kind of doesn’t matter on Thrones,'” she said. (RELATED: Director Reveals The Real Reason Sydney Sweeney Was Screaming In Pain With Blood On Her Face)
Hannah Waddingham attends the 74th Primetime Emmys at Microsoft Theater on September 12, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Hannah Waddingham attends the 81st Annual Golden Globe Awards at The Beverly Hilton on January 07, 2024 in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
“The reason why I don’t believe [Game of Thrones] is touched yet in terms of the cinematography of it for a series, it’s just a different level, but with that comes actual waterboarding,” Waddingham said to Colbert.