Protecting its "Game of Thrones" empire from leaking secrets and spoilers, HBO has been meticulous and innovative, The Washington Post reported.
"It's like protecting your house," David Benioff, who famously told Entertainment Weekly, he keeps show secrets from his wife, Amanda Peet. "You make it as hard as possible for burglars in hopes that they look for some other house to burgle, but it's impossible to ever completely secure your house."
HBO has done away with paper scripts, which can be easily leaked, employed an app-based version which keeps the script live for only short periods of time, and even reportedly has gone as far as shooting multiple endings so even the actors do not know the end result, according to the Post.
"They're very, very strict," actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau said, per the report. "It's reached a crazy level this year. We actually get the scripts, and then when we've shot the scene — and we only have it digitally — and then when you've done the scene, it just vanishes. It's like 'Mission: Impossible.' 'This will self-destruct.'"
Fellow actor Sophie Turner called HBO's script protection "tighter than the White House security," including giving little advance notice on the script before shooting.
"We would have it on an app," she said, per the report. "We would get sent sides for the scene [we were shooting] the next day. So, we would have to learn it all the day before. And once you've read it, it disappears 24 hours later, and you can never access it again.
"It's tighter than the White House security."
Show set visitors have their cell phone cameras covered with stickers, actors and characters go by code names – "so that no one knew who was really going to be on set," per Turner – and even the show films under the fake title "Face of Angels, according to the report.
"I know in 'Game of Thrones,' the ending, they're going to shoot multiple versions so that nobody really know what happens," HBO programming chief Casey Bloys told The Morning Call. "You have to do that on a long show. Because when you're shooting something, people know. So, they're going to shoot multiple versions so that there's no real definitive answer until the end."
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