Share and Follow
As it turns out, the original scene where Septa Unella is punished by Cersei Lannister — after the Septa forced Cersei to walk through King’s Landing naked to atone for her own crimes — was way worse, as Waddingham told Collider in 2021. Apparently, Cersei’s zombie henchman Gregor Clegane, known as the Mountain (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson), was supposed to sexually assault the Septa, but Waddingham said that the show had been heavily critiqued for the on-screen assault of Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) in Season 5, so she thought perhaps they’d changed course. She also said that belief was confirmed when she was flying to Belfast to film and was told she’d need a wetsuit top … and thought they’d made a mistake.
“They were like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be waterboarding instead,'” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘But we’re not actually doing waterboarding.’ And they were like, ‘No, no, no, we are.'”
Waddingham went on to say that filming the waterboarding scene was the “worst day of her life” aside from childbirth, and that Headey was also uncomfortable over the fact that she had to actually waterboard Waddingham. “It definitely gave me claustrophobia around water,” she said. “It’s quite full on being waterboarded for 10 hours—and then, for only one minute and 37 seconds to be used on camera.” Still, she said that she didn’t want to disappoint by refusing to film … and she trusted the people around her.
