Читать книгу Games of Thrones A-Z: An Unofficial Guide to Accompany the Hit TV Series - Martin Howden - Страница 15

The Dothraki are a fearsome and incredibly violent nation of raiders. When villagers see their horses coming towards them, they know their end is nigh, with the men killed and women raped. One of them is more feared than most, however.

Drogo is a powerful warlord and a fighter that has never been defeated, which is why Viserys Targaryen conspires for his young sister Daenerys to marry Drogo. The plan is for him to lead his troops against an invasion at the King’s Landing, so that eventually Viserys can reclaim the throne he believes belongs to him.

However, despite his mighty façade, Drogo’s heart softens towards his new wife and he becomes a kind and compassionate husband. His love for her never burns so brightly than when he learns of a failed assassination attempt on her life. Enraged, he decides to lead the invasion against those who would dare take his pregnant wife away from him.

He ends up killing Viserys because of his lack of respect for his sister, but is later wounded by a fellow Dothraki warrior who challenges his leadership. As a consequence, his wound festers, and, after Daenerys unwisely uses black magic to take the life of her child for that of her fatally wounded husband, she is shocked to discover she was duped – her child is no more and her husband is seemingly brain dead.

Daenerys smothers him out of sympathy and uses his funeral pyre to hatch her dragon eggs, calling her favourite dragon Drogon out of respect for her husband.

For their Drogo, HBO decided on Jason Momoa – a hulking beefcake who had appeared in Baywatch and Stargate: Atlantis, where he played the role of Ronon Dex for five years. He also starred as the lead in the remake of Conan the Barbarian.

Born in Hawaii in 1979, but raised in Iowa, Momoa ended up moving back to the island just before he was 20. It was there that he struck a modelling deal and ended up winning Hawaii’s Model of the Year in 1999, leading to his starring in Baywatch Hawaii for two years.

He is married to Cosby Show star Lisa Bonet, who gave birth to their daughter Lola Iolani Momoa in 2007, with their son Nakoa-Wolf Manakauapo Namakaeha being added to the brood a year later.

In 2008, Momoa’s face was slashed with a broken glass at a Hollywood café and he received 140 stitches as a result. A 21-year-old man was arrested and sent to prison for five years. Momoa’s scars from the attack are still obvious since the incident.

Landing the part was tough for Momoa, taking seven months between his first and second audition. However, when he came back to read for the character, he knew exactly how to channel the ferocious power of Drogo. When he performed the intimidating Haka war dance, a routine that New Zealand’s All Blacks do before a game, it frightened the life out of the casting agent.

‘It’s a war chant,’ he said to Den of Geek, ‘I just thought, in the scenes I was doing, you don’t get a sense of what this warrior’s like. What it would be like if he was commanding his officers, or what he’d be like in battle. I wanted to represent that and channel a little bit of my ancestry and heritage. I’m half Hawaiian.’

Momoa explained what awaited the agents: ‘I went into HBO and I said, “Don’t be scared or anything, but when you’re in front of a large man doing the Haka, you’re going to feel it. You’re going to feel some energy coming at you.”

‘These two little white women were like, “Holy shit.” People were coming out of their doors and wondering what was going on. It really sealed the deal. And it got me Conan. It’s a great way to start an audition. My heart was racing, and I’m sure theirs were, too.’

He was clearly excited about the part, adding, ‘I read the book. I had two days and I was hooked. Right after the audition, I read the whole thing, and it’s so great, the way you invest in these characters. You think, in the first few episodes, my character’s just this intimidating badass, but you slowly watch him fall in love and see how frail he is compared to this stoic; you compare him to the other characters, who are meant to be the good guys, and you think they’re totally the opposite. There’s such richness to these characters.’

When he attended a screening of the first episode with his wife, he warned her that she wouldn’t like what she saw. The whole episode paints Drogo as a grunting man beast and a warrior who watches with glee other people suffering, and he barely carries a thought as he roughly beds his new wife on their wedding day.

‘I didn’t want my wife to see Game of Thrones and she ended up becoming obsessed,’ he told Starpulse. ‘She was dreaming about it, she was so obsessed. We didn’t go to the premiere. I was like, “I don’t do anything but do [have sex with] Emilia Clarke for the first two episodes. I don’t even speak. We don’t need to go.”’

It shouldn’t have just been his wife that he was concerned about – audiences were turned off by his performance in the debut episode. He was too rough and ready, they said, with many mocking his ‘guyliner’ look.

However, as the series went on, more and more became enraptured by Momoa, as Drogo evolved from the one-note warrior to a man in love. His passing became one of the moving deaths in the series, and fans took to Twitter to mourn his death. Luckily for them, he came back for the end of series two in a cameo appearance, and no one was more pleased than his screen wife, Emilia Clarke, who dubs him her ‘big brother’.