In a way, Game of Thrones ended two years ago for Deborah Riley.

That's when she first found out the final twist of arguably the biggest show to ever grace television.

Getting an inside scoop as part of her role as production designer wasn't all it's cracked up to be.

"I was really looking forward to actually being free of it. Knowing how the show was ending, I found carrying that around quite a lot of pressure," she said.

Don't mistake that relief for Riley being ungrateful for what she calls a "dream job".

Before the Australian joined Game of Thrones, she admits her career was "going down in flames".

On Sunday (local time), she could collect her fifth-straight Emmy award.

The binge that led to a job

Australia production designer and art director Deborah Riley. ( IMDB )

Riley joined Game of Thrones in 2013, right as the show was airing its third season.

It had already made a splash (everyone remembers the moment they realised Ned Stark wasn't the hero of this story), but had yet to become the pop culture phenomenon it did by the time its finale aired in May this year.

Riley had seen none of it and hadn't read any of the books.

She'd been living in Los Angeles for five years, without finding the project she needed to kickstart her career.

The opportunity to work on Game of Thrones was an ultimatum, according to Riley. If she couldn't get the gig, it was time to move back to Australia.

"HBO sent me … the first 30 hours of the show," Riley said. She binge-watched it over a single weekend.

"When I saw Game of Thrones, when I realised the rich textures that the show existed in, I just knew in my very bones that's where I belonged."

As Riley puts it, her job on the series was being responsible for everything but the actors and the costumes they wore.

"I'm the head of the art department, and the art department are responsible for all of the environments in which the film takes place," she said.

"We're also responsible for the props that the actors hold, and all of the things that go along with that. When we're shooting on location then we augment locations to suit the show."

Riley had worked on massive projects in the past — The Matrix, Moulin Rouge! and the Sydney Olympics ceremonies among them — but she said working on Game of Thrones was like "having to walk in a new skin".

Deborah Riley sits on the Dragonstone Throne from Game of Thrones, one of the many environments she helped build. ( Deborah Riley )

"I'm just somebody who works behind the camera. But suddenly there was a real focus on it and people were so interested in the show," she said.

"Just the unbelievable amount of attention that the show had was just bananas."

The people that would 'literally take my teeth'

By its very nature, Game of Thrones was a story that drove wild speculation and fan theories.

"That was kind of weird, to be honest," Riley said.

"You know there are people that would literally take my teeth to learn the secrets that I have in my head."

She recalls working on the siege of Riverrun in season six, and seeing an ultralight aircraft flying overhead.

"And sure enough the next day on the internet there it [the set] was," she said.

Even scouting locations prior to filming became an issue, to the point where Riley said she could no longer wear crew jackets with the Game of Thrones logo on it while doing her work.

"We would have people who would climb trees and just go to extraordinary lengths to try and see an actor in costume or to try and guess at some plotline or other," she said.

"Even posting on Facebook, you just could never let on where you were, what you might be doing there, who you might have been with.

"And it made me incredibly cautious of social media. I think that'll have a lifelong effect."

There was no better example of fans' fervour in the final season than when a coffee cup was accidently left on set and appeared in the episode that went to air.

The internet exploded.

There were celebrations on screen, but the internet became fixated on a stray coffee cup. ( HBO )

"Fabian Wagner, who was the cinematographer of The Long Night, contacted me and said he was very happy because he'd gone from being the most hated person on the internet to handing that over to me," Riley said.

"It was very bizarre. My email was sort of being filled with questions from TMZ and other sort of magazines. I just looked at it and thought 'I'm not going to answer this, I'm not going to play into all of that'. And there were enough people who were doing that for me."

Building King's Landing — then blowing it up

In a few days' time Riley will find out if she's won her fifth Emmy award for her work on Game of Thrones.

This year she's nominated for the episode titled The Bells. It's the episode where Daenerys embraces her inner Targaryen and burns King's Landing to the ground.

Until that point, the real-life King's Landing had been the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia. You can't reduce real-life Dubrovnik to rubble though … no matter how big your TV show is.

You can build your own Dubrovnik in a giant lot in Belfast, though.

Which is exactly what Riley and her team did.

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The trick, according to Riley, was figuring out that the team would build the destroyed state of the city first, then cover it to create its perfect state.

"It's shocking when you go behind one of these doors and you see scaffolding. You really think you're in these places," actor Peter Dinklage, who played Tyrion, said of the set in a behind-the-scenes feature.

"We'll never be on anything as vast as this ever again. They've built Croatia," actress Lena Headey, who played Cersei, said in the same piece.

Deborah Riley (centre) with Philip Elton, Nick Wilkinson, Hauke Richter and Paul Ghirardani on the King's Landing set in the final season. ( Supplied: Deborah Riley )

Riley said that as more crew became involved in the build, word started to spread about the scale of the project.

"I think in a way, just because of the sheer scale of it, I think possibly that the crew appreciated it even more than anything else being done for them in the past," she said.

"It was a really special thing."

And in case you were wondering, being nominated for an Emmy never gets old.

"It made my mum and I cry," Riley said of learning of her fifth nomination.

"You never think in a million years that you could possibly be lucky to be recognised every year that we worked on the show. I mean, that's something that makes me really speechless."

Saying goodbye to medieval barrels

In a way, the Emmys will be the final chapter of Riley's Game of Thrones story.

For a show famous for the brutal betrayals suffered by its characters, it's notable that Riley says the lesson she learned from her time working on the show was the value of loyalty.

"When you're standing in the trenches at 4:30 in the morning, in the pitch dark, in the freezing cold and in the fake snow ... you need to be standing there with people that you really like and that you can rely on and you do really good work with," she said.

"The responsibility that we felt towards each other was really important because we didn't want to let each other down, let alone [series creators] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], and let alone the fans of the show at large."

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So what do you do after working on something like Game of Thrones?

"While you've got some sort of momentum it's important to try and keep it going," Riley said.

Wherever she lands next, it'll probably be a long way removed from Game of Thrones.

"So long as I don't see another medieval barrel for the rest of my career, I'm open to anything," she said.

Riley skipped the Game of Thrones tattoo on offer at the end of the series. But that doesn't mean she didn't score a keepsake of her time on the show that changed her career — other than her four (potentially five) Emmys.

She was given one of the tiny skulls of the last Targaryen dragons that featured in season seven.

A reminder of a career in flames.