B efore the cast and crew of Game of Thrones threw themselves into their final season of grueling night shoots, dragon rides, and death scenes, they gathered in Belfast for one last table read. It was the largest group ever assembled for such an occasion, all crammed in around a massive conference table made from the soaring gates of the show's lavish Season Two city of Qarth. HBO executives and trusted friends of the show lined the edges of the room as, over two days, everyone finally learned how the saga of Westeros would end.
Kit Harington had tears streaming down his face; Liam Cunningham, who played the salty Ser Davos, was cursing a blue streak. Halfway through the read, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau reached out to squeeze the shoulder of co-executive producer Bryan Cogman, who had started trembling as the body count on the page started to rise. In the end it was Cogman—who had read out every stage direction at every table read since the first in 2009—who had the final word that day: “End of Game of Thrones.” More than a year later, Sophie Turner still isn't over it. “That motherfucker,” she says with a laugh.
“It was a lovefest,” Cogman says of that table read, when the often brutal conditions of shooting seemed a world away. “And then we went and made the show and wanted to kill each other 11 months later.”
Turner, who began playing Sansa Stark when she was 13, says Cogman is the backbone of Game of Thrones. Coster-Waldau, who played Jaime Lannister, refers to him as the “walking encyclopedia.” But George R. R. Martin, who wrote the books that show-runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss adapted into what may be the last universally agreed-upon hit TV show, leans on his own Westerosi mythology to pay the highest compliment: “Dave and Dan—even though there were two of them, there really needed to be three. Bryan was the third head of the dragon.”
Hired as Weiss and Benioff's assistant when Game of Thrones first began production, Cogman wrote 11 episodes of the series—second only to the show-runners and more than Martin himself—and as a producer has three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series displayed in his living room. Martin personally asked Cogman to pitch a Thrones prequel series to HBO; when the network passed, he moved on to a deal at Amazon Studios, where, to borrow another phrase from Martin's books, he can cast a very large shadow of his own on this post-Thrones universe.
“You're only number two on the biggest show of all time once,” Cogman says, aware that Thrones-sized success may be a thing of the past for television as a whole. “So what do you want to do with that opportunity when the show ends? You try to see if you can tell your own stories.”
M ore than 10 years ago, Weiss and Benioff had finally convinced both HBO and Martin that they were the right pick to turn Game of Thrones into what they called “The Sopranos meets Middle-earth.” But they had a problem: neither of them knew the first thing about TV. Luckily, Benioff knew someone who did—his nanny's husband.
Once just another Juilliard-trained actor struggling to make it in Hollywood, Cogman first caught Benioff's eye with a script about, well, struggling actors trying to make it in Hollywood. Fed up with jobs that include a telemarketing gig in the Valley selling toner cartridges—a job that theater nerd Cogman describes as “like Glengarry Glen Ross, but worse”—and with watching former classmates like Lee Pace and Anthony Mackie smile down at him from 14-foot billboards, the then 28-year-old Cogman was attempting to re-write his way out of a familiar story of Hollywood despair.
Benioff, best known at the time for well-received novels such as the one he adapted into the 2002 Spike Lee movie 25th Hour, liked what he saw but didn't have a job for Cogman yet. So he called in a favor to his childhood friend NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman and landed Cogman a job as the executive's assistant (there were two others) and driver. Cogman nearly wrecked Silverman's car on his second night behind the wheel.
“You're a terrible driver,” Cogman recalls Silverman saying, “but I like hanging out with you.” Perhaps in an attempt to protect the paint on his other cars, Silverman eventually got his driver a writers'-assistant job, fetching coffee and the like, on an NBC show: My Own Worst Enemy, which ended after just two months, in December 2008.
However short-lived, the show was an education for Cogman in the basics of breaking a story for television. When Weiss and Benioff snapped up Cogman as their own assistant, they set up shop in a dingy suite of now demolished offices on the former Pickford-Fairbanks Studios lot and asked the guy who thought he was just there to fetch lunches where they should start.
“I got my marker and David sat in his chair and Dan sat in his,” Cogman remembers. Without any other staff hired, the three of them went to work figuring out how to introduce TV audiences to the scheming Lannisters, the honorable Starks, the looming Wall, Daenerys Targaryen and her three baby dragons. “None of us knew really what we were doing. No one was really bothering us or telling us we were doing it wrong. We cooked up Season One, the three of us in that room in the winter and early spring of 2009.”
Cogman still likes to joke that the only reason he got the job is because Benioff—who was about to set off to Europe with his wife, actor Amanda Peet—wanted to hold on to the excellent child care provided by Cogman's wife, actor Mandy Olsen. “That backfired! As soon as I became a TV writer, she quit,” Cogman says, laughing. “Joke's on you, Benioff!”
Tipped off by his wife to Benioff's early interest in the books, Cogman had read the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series in the hope of a small role in the show—“Maybe I'll get to play a guy with a spear!” By the time he was in the room with Weiss and Benioff, Cogman had started re-reading—he estimates he's read the first book, A Game of Thrones, at least 20 times now—and boiling down the dense and complicated world of Westeros into digestible outlines, family trees, and quick little summaries. “We thought we knew the books pretty well, but Bryan was just on a different level,” Weiss and Benioff wrote in a joint e-mail. That work landed Cogman a seat in every meeting and was a godsend to every confused HBO executive, director, production designer, and actor.
The show-runners quickly deviated from the Hollywood norm of treating their assistant like a glorified errand boy; while working on Season One, they surprised Cogman with an offer to write his own episode, “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things.” As Weiss and Benioff recalled, “We'd never written a season of television before, and we'd underestimated how long it would take. Then we looked across the room and there was Bryan. Smart, tireless, passionate Bryan. Sure, he wasn't experienced, but hell, neither were we.”
Martin's review of Cogman's work was straightforward: “An excellent episode! Straight from my books!”
Weiss and Benioff dubbed Cogman “lore master”; Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth, jokes, “I have never once seen Bryan with George R. R. Martin, and the rumor is that they could be the same person.” Martin, for his part, likens Cogman to the helpful and well-read character Samwell Tarly, a comparison the author usually reserves for himself. As the series grew bigger and Martin repeatedly delayed the release of his final books in the series, the author grew noticeably distant from the show, with no writing credits after Season Four and no recent appearances at the splashy premiere events until the final one, in April. Responding on his LiveJournal to a controversial Season Five scene that differed dramatically from the books, Martin described the show and his work as “two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose … but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.”
Martin hasn't commented much on his relationship with HBO and the series, but he is unreserved in his praise for Cogman: “I feel simpatico with Bryan,” Martin says. “He's helped keep the show true to my books, and the characters true to the characters I created, which may not be important to everybody in the world, but is certainly important to me.”
I n the beginning Cogman clung doggedly to some less essential parts of the books. (He's now mortified to recount a fight he picked over cutting a minor Season One character named Marillion. “Nearly in tears! Over Marillion! And I was the fucking assistant.”) But he also used his book knowledge to suggest killing off Ned Stark in the ninth episode of the first season, rather than saving it for the finale, a shock that went on to define the high stakes of the series. Cogman, a lifelong student of drama, knows how differently stories can play when acted out. So while others may compare Cogman to Samwell Tarly, he favors another character: Varys, the slick spymaster who uses political maneuvers and access to the most powerful players to keep himself in the game. Or, at least, he says, “I'm the good parts of Varys.”
From the very start Cogman homed in on the basic character details that made Thrones a success beyond its spectacle. “It's about one buddy going back to his old buddy's house for dinner,” he says, describing the simple power of the pilot. “If you don't have that, then you have a lot of other imitators that have come along since and haven't been as good.”
Production on Game of Thrones was massive from the start, and Weiss and Benioff quickly put Cogman in charge of some pivotal scenes at the end of Season One, featuring Peter Dinklage's Tyrion Lannister and his scathing father, Tywin Lannister, played by Charles Dance. Cogman, who claims he didn't know any better, wielded so much authority that director Alan Taylor just assumed he was a producer. “Why the hell have I been taking orders from you the past few months?” Cogman recalls Taylor joking when he discovered the truth.
The show sprawled after Season One, with at least two units—named the Dragon and the Wolf—shooting simultaneously. Weiss and Benioff leveraged their titles to take charge of the sets in exotic and temperate Spain, Croatia, and Morocco, leaving Cogman as their man on the ground in Belfast, where the show filmed the bulk of its interior scenes.
In Belfast, Cogman worked on behalf of Weiss and Benioff as fastidious keeper of the script, earning the nickname “Shakespeare” from Dance when he insisted that a line be read word for word. As a former actor, Cogman developed a reputation as an actor's writer. “He gets the life of an actor,” Coster-Waldau explains. “He's extremely respectful when it comes to not getting in your way.” Adds Turner, “Bryan's lines are always the ones that affect me the most.”
When it came time to divvy up who would actually write each episode, Weiss and Benioff preferred season premieres, finales, and the big, splashy set pieces in between.
Cogman, on the other hand, preferred the performance episodes, full of scenes, he says, of “people talking in rooms.” He wrote the two key moments of the Jaime and Brienne love story, from the Season Three bathtub scene in “Kissed by Fire” to the emotional Season Eight climax “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” which sees the former Lannister antihero knighting the unlikely lady warrior. These quiet, shared moments stood out among all the dragon fire, shocking deaths, and big-budget battle spectacle.
“He has been a champion of my character Brienne and actually of me as an actor,” Christie says. “He had a real understanding of the trials the character had to overcome in order to achieve a sense of self-worth and how far we sometimes have to travel to move the narrative society has prescribed to us.”
“I can't imagine what it would have been like without Bryan,” Coster-Waldau says. “Thank God I don't have to.”
In Season Five Cogman volunteered to write what would become one of the show's most controversial episodes, in which the sadistic Ramsay Bolton rapes Sansa Stark, with Theon Greyjoy looking on in horror. Cogman, a father of three, had always taken a particular interest in protecting the show's younger performers on set. Turner compares him to a father figure, and Cogman felt he owed it to her to write the episode himself. “Why the hell did I choose ‘Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken’?” Cogman asks years later, then responding, “Good question.”
The scene was lifted from another character's story in the books and incorporated into a larger gothic nightmare plot of Sansa's being held prisoner in her childhood home at Winterfell—a practical, and carefully considered, way to give Sansa, who isn't in the fifth book at all, a bigger role in the story. Weiss and Benioff suggested closing the bedroom door on Sansa, Ramsay, and Theon rather than showing the act itself. “I am the one, God help me,” Cogman says, “who said, ‘If we do this are we being dismissive of what that real horror would be behind that door? Are we being disrespectful of the severity of that situation?’ But we, of course, never wanted to make Sophie go through a graphic scene.”
The result was still graphic enough to spark immediate online backlash and heated think pieces; then senator Claire McCaskill publicly declared she would no longer watch the show. HBO issued no official response to the controversy, and Weiss and Benioff have never commented publicly, even deleting a question about it in e-mailed responses for a recent Rolling Stone story.
Cogman stands by the scene, though he acknowledges it served as a pivotal point in a larger cultural discussion about sexual assault on-screen, which had also been used as a plot device on Mad Men and Breaking Bad, among others. “I will never presume to tell someone how they should feel about the scene itself. And believe me, I really tried to listen to all the criticism surrounding it and will continue to listen,” Cogman says. “I do take issue with the presumption of bad faith on our part—the idea that we treated Sophie or the character or the subject matter callously. I think if you watch the scene and see how it fits into the character's larger narrative arc over the subsequent seasons, you'll see that's not the case. At least I hope so.”
“It was a very difficult scene to write,” Cogman says. “It was a very difficult scene to shoot.”
“You see Bryan standing there, crying and wanting to hug you, he did that often,” Turner says. “He was the one that held me afterwards and we both cried together. He's apologizing because he wrote the scene. It was kind of beautiful. It felt like I was safe and not exploited in any way because I was with him. He's always been something of a protector, so it's really special to have him there.”
The controversies around Season Five, which saw many beloved characters used, abused, or shipped off to Dorne, did not dampen the show's popularity. That September Cogman and his fellow producers picked up the first of three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series, among a pile of others the show won.
A s Game of Thrones headed toward its conclusion, it also moved away from the intimate, theater-like moments Cogman excelled at—partly a function of the large-scale conflict built into Martin's story, but also the TV landscape that Thrones transformed, bringing C.G.I.-heavy blockbuster spectacle to the small screen and daring other networks to keep up. HBO underwent a transformation as well. Once best-known as a boutique home for prestige TV, the premium cable channel was acquired last summer by AT&T, and an executive revealed plans to increase HBO's output of original content by 50 percent in 2019.
For a while, Cogman thought one of those new shows would be his to run. He had no ambition to do any kind of Thrones sequel until Martin asked him personally at a dinner with Weiss and Benioff in May 2017. There was a particular story he felt only Cogman could tell. (Many fans have guessed that it's the Targaryen-centric Dance of the Dragons tale, but for now Martin and Cogman are keeping it to themselves.) “The logical heir was Bryan,” Martin says. “He had been there since the very beginning.”
Despite himself, Cogman yielded to the excitement of the project. But the timing couldn't have been worse. Cogman had to pitch HBO his prequel idea while the final season of Game of Thrones was in production, and he was in a bake-off with four other writers, some of whom had also worked with Martin. Weiss and Benioff gave Cogman their blessing but were busy wrapping up their own time in Westeros, which meant any advice they gave was incidental: “Every now and then we'd discuss something or other while we were shivering in the writer's tent in Northern Ireland,” they wrote.
Collaborating with Martin on the prequel pitch, Cogman felt both a pressure and an arrogance that came from being the only contender in the race who had both worked on the original series and was handpicked by Martin. He spent the bulk of the final season's shoot under the impression that this wasn't truly his final season. “I wasn't really doing the kind of emotional, cathartic work one needs to do to say goodbye to everything,” he says.
Cogman found out he didn't get the job in spring 2018, and that Jane Goldman would, instead, be helming a series centered on the earliest days of Westeros. At the same time, his wife—who had put her own acting career on hold for most of a decade to support Cogman's work—was suffering from a herniated disk. Disappointed and suddenly having to move his family out of their home in Belfast, Cogman has no memory of his last day on the set of Game of Thrones: “I was exhausted and Mandy was hurting. We were packing up our lives of 10 years.”
“It hit me hard, not because I thought there was any great injustice. I'm sure Jane's show is going to be great,” Cogman says. “But all the insecurities come up: What, I can't even write Game of Thrones now?”
The story Martin so favored may live on at HBO, but Cogman is ready to try new things. Last September, Amazon Studios snapped him up and put him to work—the day after he picked up his third Emmy for Thrones—consulting on a hotly anticipated project he can't yet disclose. But, most exciting for Cogman, he will be developing a whole raft of shows that may have nothing whatsoever to do with dragons.
Martin still texts regularly with Cogman, and has offered occasional friendly input as Cogman searches for new books that Amazon might adapt. “I hope to work with him again someday if the various corporate entities that we work for allow it,” Cogman jokes. But Martin himself is locked into an overall deal with HBO, and Cogman, finally, is ready to move on. He attended the splashy Game of Thrones Season Eight premiere at Radio City Music Hall in April, but the following Monday he was back to work at Amazon, with a large-scale poster of a trio of his favorites—Arya, Sansa, and Brienne—watching over him.
“I was number two to the captain, and now I've gotta see if I can sit in that captain's chair,” Cogman says. “I'm looking forward to finding my people the way Dan and David found theirs.”
