Ask Gold to speak to her love of the Nordic crime genre, and the reserved Brit starts gushing. “I was just completely obsessed with The Killing. It’s really great when you do casting to watch that Scandinavian stuff. You don’t know anyone, and it’s a complete thrill to see what seems like completely new people. I started to believe I could speak Danish really quickly, even though I obviously can’t. Borgen, I just love them. Trapped—I don't know what it’s called in Icelandic—I love The Bridge. And the other one with Aksel Hennie who was in Headhunters with Nikolaj [Coster-Waldau]. Nobel!”

So Scandinavian crime actors might want to start brushing up on their auditioning skills for Season 8—or, better yet, one of the many, many potential upcoming spin-offs.

Sometimes There’s No Audition at All

Dig all you like: you’ll never find footage of either Sean Bean or Peter Dinklage auditioning for Game of Thrones, because they never had to. Bean and Dinklage were the first and only picks for the roles of Ned Stark and Tyrion Lannister. “We did have a nice lunch with Sean Bean,” Gold recalls. Some of the bigger names who are joining the series nowadays also don’t have to audition. Thrones once boasted a cast of largely unknowns, but Gold has started to pepper more famous names like Jonathan Pryce, Ian McShane, Max von Sydow, and Jim Broadbent into the mix.

“We’ve got to the place where it doesn't unbalance it—the other actors have become stars in their own right—and we haven't overdone it,” Gold explains. “It’s quite a subtle smattering. We’re not casting them because they’re names or they’re not names, we’ve just been casting them because they seem like they’d be really great in the part. And when you say, ‘What about Max von Sydow?’ and [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] really respond to it, once you start thinking about it, it’s just kind of irresistible.”

How Do You Cast When There’s No Dialogue?

“Oh, Hodor, poor Hodor,” Gold murmurs when the subject of Kristian Nairn’s gentle giant comes up. “Hodor should be the most impossible part to cast.” While searching for the trusty Stark servant, Gold recalled Nairn from his audition for Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz. (Another Thrones star, Rory McCann, eventually got that monosyllabic part.) Nairn says that Gold asked for tape with only “fifteen minute’s notice.” The Irish actor crashed a friend’s 40th birthday party in order to borrow a child for the tape, and got around the challenges of a largely dialogue-free audition by cantering around someone’s yard with the young boy, shouting Hodor with as much inflection as he could muster. As for Sam Coleman, the teenaged actor who played Hodor in Season 6, Gold says finding him was just “an incredible stroke of luck. He somehow walked through the door. And you thought, my God, this is the most lucky day of all time.”

Jason Momoa, who landed the Season 1 role of Khal Drogo, took a different approach to his character’s minimal dialogue. “[Drogo] doesn’t say much,” he recently told The New York Times. “So how do you convey him? There’s nothing in the script. So I said: ‘I have this idea. Is it O.K. to do [a dance] before the audition?’ And they were like, ‘Oh, sure.’ Then I did the Haka. It was challenging to do the audition afterward—I couldn’t stop my heart from beating. The first time I did it, they were very scared. But then they wanted me to come back in so they could put it on tape.” Momoa’s on-screen partner, Emilia Clarke, also busted a move in her audition, going with The Funky Chicken and The Robot in order to land the part. Gold recalls of both: “It’s fun, and sort of a welcome relief when something like that happens. There’s so much heavy stuff in Game of Thrones that sometimes it’s quite nice to laugh for a moment.”

A Diverse Choice

“Oh my God, don’t you just totally love Pedro Pascal so much?” Gold gushes of the scene-stealer who played Oberyn Martell in Season 4. Pascal stole more than just scenes, as he recently admitted to Seth Meyers. The actor nabbed the part of Oberyn right out from under the nose of one of his protégées. Pascal leaned on his close friendship with Sarah Paulson (who is in turn close with David Benioff’s wife, Amanda Peet) to get his audition in front of Gold. For his tape, Pascal adopted an accent based on his father, who is Chilean. “We basically wanted to have this sort of Latin element to it,” Gold says of casting the fictional kingdom of Dorne.

When asked about Game of Thrones being hammered over the years for a lack of diversity in the cast, Gold explains: “Even though these are fantasy worlds, there are tribes, families, and dynasties. Once you’ve put one mark on the canvas for the Targaryens or the Starks, you really owe it to the, oh I can’t think of the word, but the authenticity of trying to make them a family somehow. In the books, the Targaryens are these white, white people with silver hair and violet eyes. The Starks are kind of rough, like Northern English people. The Lannisters are golden, aren’t they? We really believed we were doing it like the books, basically.”