Mahershala Ali may have an Oscar for Moonlight, but he still has one regret: that a backless stool bungled his audition for the Game of Thrones Season 2 role of Qarthian merchant Xaro Xhoan Daxos. “I had gone in for this casting director before, and I felt like I had two other wonky auditions with her,” Ali told Jimmy Kimmel in a January interview, before describing how the seating options ruined his planned audition poses.

Nina Gold was that casting director. An industry veteran and three-time Emmy winner (two of them for Thrones), Gold has considered actors for roles as varied as a Dothraki and a White Walker. She’s also handpicked actors like Sophie Turner and Kit Harington and turned them into stars. With the show’s seventh season approaching, and even more actors preparing to enter the spotlight after Gold chose them, the casting director got on the phone to look back at the decisions she’s made . . . and, yes, a few regrets. After calling the actor who got the part of Xaro Xhoan Daxos, Nonso Anozie, “bloody great,” Gold admits, “Wow, how could I have ever turned down Mahershala Ali?”

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The Ones That Got Away

Ali isn’t the only future star who never made it to Westeros. “I auditioned for Game of Thrones seven times!” Outlander heartthrob Sam Heughan told Vulture in 2014. “I’m sure that’s an exaggeration,” Gold laughs now. But Heughan has total recall: “I auditioned for Renly, Loras, some of the members of the Night’s Watch. And I’d always get so close! I’d be like, ‘Guys, just give me a sword!’”

O.K., Gold didn’t spot Sam as the kilted diamond in the rough he was. But what about someone like Gillian Anderson? “She is about one of my favorite actresses,” Gold says. But for Anderson, the feeling wasn’t entirely mutual. “My 18-year-old cannot believe that I would turn down Game Of Thrones or Downton—things she loves to watch,” Anderson told The Daily Mail in 2013. “But if I am going to be spending that amount of time working on something, I would rather be working with a director like Martin Scorsese.”

Get Them While They’re Young

Thrones has a reputation for casting incredible young performers. Without the likes of Maisie Williams, Sophie Turner, Isaac Hempstead-Wright, Jack Gleeson, and more, the show about Stark and Lannister children could never have gotten off the ground. You can see Williams and Turner auditioning in the clip above, in a scene George R.R. Martin himself has said he regrets cutting from the show. Gold says casting the original kids was a process that took “a long time” and that she “looked all over the place.” The casting director has since refined her technique for finding young talent, and cites The Television Workshop—a “great young actor’s workshop in Nottingham”—as a solid source for picks like Season 6 scene-stealer Bella Ramsey (a.k.a. Lyanna Mormont).

Go Abroad

Gold confesses that she has a passion for Scandinavian dramas, a fact evident to anyone who recognized two stars of the Danish TV series Borgen filling out the Game of Thrones ranks: Birgitte Hjort Sørensen as the Season 5 Wildling warrior Karsi in “Hardhome,” and Pilou Asbaek as villainous Season 6 newcomer Euron Greyjoy.

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.”

“I guess I don’t know what to really say about it, because it’s not like there’s no diversity in the casting in Game of Thrones. We’ve turned Grey Worm and Missandei into really deep characters.” Gold, who has also cast the most recent, multi-cultural Star Wars films adds, “I really do believe in diversity in casting, and always have done. I don’t feel I have to defend it, really.”

Casting a Part Audiences Already Know and Love

Gold had a unique challenge for Season 6, when she had to cast younger versions of not only Hodor, but also the show’s first hero: Ned Stark. “You do find yourself staring at ancient pictures of Sean Bean, from when he was 17,” she says. Eventually, she settled on Robert Aramayo and the even younger Sebastian Croft. “Then closing your eyes and wondering if you’re imagining the resemblance.” Aramayo, for what it’s worth, had no idea he was auditioning for Ned Stark. “It was very ambiguous. I just put a tape together,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. Gold explains, ”It’s definitely more of a quality and a kind of spirit that makes it work, more than an exact look-alike. Look-alikes can do as well, if you can find it. But it’s a quality, isn’t it, that you’re looking for.”

Gold applied a similar logic when casting the Season 6 “players”—Essie Davis, Richard E. Grant et. al.—who were meant to stand in for Cersei, King Robert, and more. “It’s a total hoot, basically,” she says of casting the fake play. “The actors think it’s really good fun, as well.”

Sometimes the Right Actor Reads for the Wrong Part

Iwan Rheon (a.k.a. Ramsay Bolton) famously auditioned to play Jon Snow. But he’s not the only performer Gold decided would be better suited elsewhere in the cast. Conleth Hill (Lord Varys) initially read for the part of Robert Baratheon, but says he gave up all hope for the part when he saw actor Mark Addy was also up for it. “It is funny to think of it now,” Gold explains, “but at the time, a lot of the young men actors auditioned for all the different young man roles. Richard Madden [Robb Stark], Alfie Allen [Theon Greyjoy], and Gethin Anthony [Renly Baratheon] all read for multiple parts. Thankfully, it all worked out for the best for all of them.” Perhaps best of all for Allen, who is the only one whose character is still alive on the show.

Who Chooses the Audition Text?

Gemma Whelan—who plays Yara Greyjoy—recently told the story of an audition scene in which she and her fictional brother, Theon, have a rather inappropriate meeting while riding a horse. In the original audition script, Whelan explains, it says “Yara is ‘worrying’ [Theon’s] cock.” Gold explains that it’s Weiss and Benioff who pick which bits of text an actor will audition with. “They really know the material, and it’s normally pretty obvious which is the kind of seminal scene that’s got all the stuff we really need to see. So, they’re very good at picking that stuff out.”

The Process Is Much Harder Now

As you might imagine, the massive amount of scrutiny on Game of Thrones means the audition process has become somewhat fraught for Gold. “It was quite secretive at the beginning,” she says, ”but everybody’s so desperate to find out what’s going on these days.” While old Thrones audition footage contains familiar lines of dialogue, nowadays actors are asked to audition with wholly invented scenes that are never intended to make it into the show. Eagle-eyed spoiler fiends are always on the lookout for leaked audition dialogue or even character descriptions that might lend clues to what’s on the horizon. “Everything comes with a password and special, secret names,” according to Gold. “You have to really have your wits about you to figure it out, even if you’ve been doing it for eight years.”

The Most Difficult Cast Is a Re-Cast

Game of Thrones has had to re-cast a number of actors over the years, and this, Gold says, is the hardest part of her job. Jennifer Ehle (Pride and Prejudice) and Tamzin Merchant (. . .also Pride and Prejudice) lost the roles of Catelyn Stark and Daenerys Targaryen, respectively, after a disastrous Game of Thrones pilot forced Weiss and Benioff to go back to the drawing board. Gold is at her most pained talking about these decisions. “It’s terrible to disappoint . . . it’s difficult to let down . . . that’s hard. It’s tough, but you've got to get it right, ultimately. Jennifer Ehle is really brilliant, but I guess things changed about the way everybody saw it.” The show also re-cast Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane multiple times (due to “availability problems,” Gold says), and re-cast the youngest members of the royal Baratheon family: Tommen and Myrcella. On the subject of tapping Dean-Charles Chapman and Nell Tiger Free to replace Callum Wharry and Aimee Richardson, Gold is fairly matter-of-fact: “Tommen and Myrcella, they were so young in this first incarnation. We thought we could get away with it, and I think we more or less did.”