'Game of Thrones' Shooting Interrupted by Rockslide

Published Mar 28, 2016

Next month, Game of Thrones will return with plenty more fantastical blood, guts and sex. The epic series has had plenty of hiccups on the way to its sixth season, not the least of which was a rockslide that interrupted its production.The show's Castle Black set is located in Northern Ireland's Magheramorne Quarry, where a large rock wall is decorated to look like it's made of ice. As Entertainment Weekly reports, large pieces of the wall collapsed after heavy rain caused a major rockslide.Showrunner Dan Weiss joked about the rockslide, saying, "Once people saw the small pebbles start to come down that turned into slightly larger pebbles, everybody made the group decision to immediately step away from the set."Actor Owen Teale added, "A piece of rock the size of a London townhouse just fell."While no one was injured, the rockslide caused a major scheduling issue for executive producer Bernie Caulfield and producer Chris Newman, who have to maintain a seriously meticulous schedule."Bernie and Chris already have hardest scheduling job in the film and TV industry, and they had this thrown into the works too, which caused them to drastically reschedule the whole season on the fly," Weiss added. "But they did it, and we got everything we needed in that quarry after it was seismically shored up and netted and proper protection measures were taken. It actually worked out for the best – some of the stuff we were shooting in that location benefited from the additional prep time the rockslide gave us."It all worked out, and Game of Thrones will return to HBO on April 24.