Welcome to Dubrovnik Croatia A.K.A. King's Landing

“You wouldn't think boats would need horns!” Peter Dinklage shouts. “Can’t you see them coming?”

The Game of Thrones star stands on a rustic villa’s scenic terrace above the shimmering deep blue Adriatic, which at the moment is inconveniently bustling with honking watercraft. The Emmy winner has been trying to get through a pivotal scene with Conleth Hill, who plays the crafty eunuch Varys, and keeps being interrupted. Hill drily commiserates: “Yes, can’t they just close Croatia while we’re shooting?”

Dinklage rubs his recently grown beard. “My crate beard,” he calls it, a reference to his fugitive character Tyrion Lannister’s sea voyage from Westeros to Essos (Pentos, to be exact), which he spent sealed in a box. Before joining the show, Dinklage told producers his one demand was that Tyrion wouldn’t have the stereotypical fantasy-tale dwarf beard. Five seasons later— voilà!—beard, albeit one that’s more Jim Morrison than Gimli. For this scene from the April 12 season premiere, Tyrion was just unpacked. Naturally he goes straight for the wine. Once the sea traffic quiets, his sharp exchange with Varys perfectly sets up the show’s fifth season:

Tyrion: “A drunken dwarf will never be a savior of the Seven Kingdoms.” Varys: “You have your father’s instincts for politics and you have compassion.” Tyrion: “Compassion? I killed my lover with my bare hands and I shot my own father with a crossbow.” Varys: “I never said you were perfect.” Tyrion: “What is it you want, exactly?” Varys: “Peace, prosperity. A land where the powerful do not prey on the powerless...a ruler loved by millions with a powerful army and the right family name.” Tyrion: “Good luck finding him.” Varys: “Who said anything about him?”

On a show stuffed with sprawling and disparate story lines, this beat is everything. Varys is expressing a sentiment the brutal series has long avoided: hope, a dream of spring that escapes the tyranny and darkness of the past four seasons.

“It was kinda huge,” says Hill. “The first time Varys puts his cards on the table and says, ‘This is what I want.’ ” And by pushing Tyrion to seek out her—Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke)—season 5’s most game-changing move is revealed. After years of spreading its characters across the map, the Thrones-verse is finally beginning to contract. “Worlds are colliding,” says David Benioff, who is showrunner along with Dan Weiss. “One of the things we’ve been most excited about from the beginning of the series is we’ve had all these far-flung story lines across Westeros and Essos, which almost never cross. Now some of these characters start to head on a collision course for each other.”

For Tyrion, filled with guilt over murdering his lover and his father last season, the quest gives him new purpose: “He’s heard so many stories about this woman,” Dinklage says. “He hears that she is a kindred spirit, someone who’s an outsider who’s been pushed to the edges, but has an unfortunate dirty last name. He wants to know her in person.”

Whether Tyrion gets his wish this season—or ever—is one of the show’s many secrets. The characters have not met in Martin’s novels. Yet what the books have or haven’t done is being increasingly overruled in favor of keeping the show’s labyrinthian narrative on the most compelling possible track. Characters still alive in the books will die this season. Key story lines will deviate in controversial ways. And one major subplot (from Martin’s A Feast for Crows, set in the Iron Islands) is omitted entirely.

Martin has no comment on the changes. After penning an episode in each of the previous seasons, he’s elected to devote more time this year to his long-awaited next novel. “Every season has been a little bit more [divergent],” Benioff says. “It’s an adaptation; the show has to adapt in order to survive.”

Adapt or die—it’s practically the Westeros motto (or one of them anyway; Westeros has a lot of mottos). The changes also mean you can expect more Twitter-erupting shock twists, a few with moments so pitch-black they might even rival season 3’s notorious Red Wedding. “With each season, the stakes get higher and higher and the war gets bloodier and bloodier,” says producer Bryan Cogman. “We’re in season 5 and there’s an expectation for big events and consequences.”

The producers are even shaking up their own format a bit as well. For the first time, at least one series regular is benched for the season: Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) will get his seer training from the three-eyed raven off screen, and the Hound (Rory McCann) isn’t expected back either. (He may well be dead; the writers aren’t saying.) The year will also open with the show’s first-ever flashback, a scene involving Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey)—fitting, since season 5 is the most dramatic yet for Headey’s paranoid queen regent, finally in charge at King’s Landing after her father’s death. “Sadly, she doesn’t really know much about their finances and political allies,” Headey says. “She doesn’t care about that, she just has too much hatred for certain people, so she doesn’t help her cause and she invests in the wrong people.”

On the set in Old Town, Headey munches on a slice of pizza, looking rather indescribable. (Literally, we’re not allowed to describe her—it’s a spoiler.) It’s Headey’s birthday, and she’s preparing to shoot a top secret Cersei nude scene. She won’t be performing in her birthday suit, however; a body double is being used instead. (Fun fact for the kids: Headey dubbed her double’s pubic wig “rice catcher.”) “I obviously chose not to be naked for many reasons, but we want it to work beautifully,” says the actress, who was cheered by Dinklage and Hill, who visited on their day off to sing her “Happy Birthday.”

High above Headey, tourists and paparazzi jockey for a view on the city’s high stone bulwarks. The crew erects a giant screen to hide her from the watchers on the wall. Unfortunately for the production, news of this sequence leaked when media reports declared Thrones was banned from filming in a local church and had to switch locations. Benioff explains that while the show faces many impossible-seeming challenges, this actually wasn’t one of them. “We lost a location in Northern Ireland, too, only because a very religious person decided our show was blasphemous, and the new location we decided to shoot on works better. It always happens, and it puts more work on the location teams, but it always ends up working out.”

During our visit, a much easier problem presents itself. A nude male extra sparks an only-on-Thrones debate. Namely, is it okay if a naked guy in this medieval-style fantasy world is, um, clearly circumcised? Do the old gods and/or the new have any opinion on this subject? (Verdict: The extra made the cut.)

Departing Croatia for our next stop, we head to the Dubrovnik airport along with some Thrones cast members, where security is so relaxed that travelers are casually strolling through the scanner. Wearing shoes? Okay. Laptop in bag? Sure.

Dinklage quips, “Is a scimitar okay?”

Once in the terminal, waiting for the plane to begin boarding, the actor seems less amused. There are stares everywhere, pointing, and awkward photo requests. “Especially this year, the [fan attention] has become more intense,” says costar Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. “Dinklage might have to retire and just hide.”

The Thrones cast lives in a spotlight that gets brighter each year. The show is ascending to a pop culture magnitude that’s typically only reserved for the most hallowed of movie franchises, like Star Wars or Harry Potter. And nowhere is that interest more intense than in...