29. Animals are notoriously badly behaved on set. The cat that plays Ser Pounce refused to stay on the bed in episode four, Oathkeeper, when Margaery visits Tommen’s bedroom at night. In fact, if you watch the scene closely, you’ll see the cat run out of Natalie Dormer’s hands and jump off the bed twice. According to director Michelle Maclaren, there are moments when Dormer is petting the cat in that scene where it’s nowhere near her or Tommen.

30. Likewise, the owl that Styr, Magnar of Thenn sees through the eyes of refused to land on its mark in The Watchers On The Wall. It took two hours of attempts with the owl, and as director Neil Marshall tells it, they were just about ready to give up and use a CG bird when it finally did as it was told.

31. The platform on which Jaime and Bronn spar with one another is actually a modern concrete patio belonging to a Croatian big-shot, on which the art department had to individually paint tiny stone tiles and dress with fake coastal rocks.

32. Daniel Portman, who plays Podrick the page, had to do a bit of old-fashioned Hollywood trickery in episode four. In the scene when Pod and Brienne leave King’s Landing in search of Sansa Stark, he is holding a very real axe (the one he used to save Tyrion’s life) but watch as he ducks down to pick up a rucksack and swaps the real axe for a rubber replacement to use when mounting Pod’s horse. (All of the weapons carried whilst riding horses are made from rubber or bamboo to protect the animals).

33. To achieve the sense of sunlight sparkling off the waves and through the windows of the ship that Littlefinger and Sansa are escaping on (which was on gimbals and moving enough to make a number of the crew sick during filming the scene) production used boards covered with sequins to reflect studio lights.