Be warned, this post discusses a major character death on Game Of Thrones.
Serving as an extra in any scene of Game Of Thrones would be a dream come true for most fans. But as one of the many background players at the “Purple Wedding” in the show’s fourth season, Felipe Ferri had “the rare opportunity to see that little prick, King Joffrey, choke to death a dozen times just a few paces from me!”
Ferri took to Quora last year to answer a question about what it’s like to be an extra on Game Of Thrones. Since he had only read the first book, he didn’t immediately know the importance of the scene. But he writes, “If there is a situation where it is alright to receive a spoiler, that was it!”
The wedding feast was shot over five days in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Ferri and the other extras would be picked up at 4 a.m. and end work at 7 p.m., but he explains, “everything was so exciting that even the long hours didn’t matter.” While Ferri is Brazilian, most of the other extras were Croatian locals and many knew nothing about the series. But being a fan, Ferri managed to chat with some of the main cast and even take photos with them.
Ferri calls the work “easy” and explains there was a lot of down time between crowd scenes and the extras would chat with each other or walk around set. “When we had to shoot,” he explains, “there was a production assistant who placed every extra on the place he should be and explained what we should be doing.”
He also talks a bit about getting sucked into the world of Westeros:
It is funny that you kinda begin to think that everything is real, and you kinda start to think that the guys in armor are really soldiers, though they’re regular people just like you. It is kinda scary, if you think about it. It was also extremely funny the anachronisms that you see in a place like that. Though your brain is starting to accept that you are in a medieval world, suddenly when you look to the side you see a servant typing on his iPhone, or a City Watch guard smoking a cigarette, or an old nobleman drinking boxed juice…