Being waterboarded on Game Of Thrones gave Hannah Waddingham "chronic claustrophobia"

If we had a nickel for every time an actor relitigated a scene where they or their co-star had been waterboarded this week, we’d have two nickels—which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right? First, it was Kirsten Dunst talking about her “miserable” Spider-Man upside-down kiss, and now it’s Hannah Waddingham, who revealed on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert that filming Game Of Thrones had a lasting effect on her psyche (far more than anything regarding its final season).

“Thrones gave me something I wasn’t expecting from it, which was chronic claustrophobia,” the Ted Lasso actor said. “It was horrific. Ten hours of being actually waterboarded. Like actually.”

Luckily, Waddingham doesn’t seem to harbor a lot of resentment toward showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for this ethically murky and frankly pretty illegal-sounding treatment. It’s “the reason why I don’t believe [Thrones] is touched yet in terms of the cinematography of it. For a series, it’s just a different level,” she explained. “But with that comes actual waterboarding.”

Despite the potentially lifelong medical condition, Waddingham has a good sense of humor about the whole thing. “I’m on my way back [from set] with grape juice all in my hair so it went purple, I couldn’t speak because the Mountain had his hand over my mouth while I was screaming and I had strap marks everywhere like I had been attacked,” she said. “One of the other guys who had been shooting something else was like, ‘You’re lucky, I’ve just been crawling through shit on my elbow for four days.’ It kind of doesn’t matter when you’re in Thrones. You just want to give the best.”

Waddingham has spoken about this scene at length before, including in a 2021 interview with Collider in which she said that filming it was the second worst day of her life, second only to childbirth. “But in those moments you have to think, do you serve the piece and get on with it or do you chicken out and go, ‘No, this isn’t what I signed up for, blah, blah, blah?’”

Regardless of Waddingham’s perspective on this, this writer says “shame.” It seems like, somewhere along the way, someone should have said “no” before the first jug of wine was poured. Hopefully, no one was put in this sort of position on the set of Benioff and Weiss’ newest series, 3 Body Problem.