Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton on leaving and returning to the show

Game of Thrones is a great show because of a lot of things, but one of the most important things is the attention to detail that the crew members put. The behind the scenes efforts are truly appreciable, and one of the main people behind the screen is the costume designing head, Michele Clapton. She spoke about her break from the show for a while in Season 6, and more, in a recent interview with Fast Company. Read on!

Michele has been on Game of Thrones since the beginning, but she decided to sit out most of Season 6, which she says helped her get back to the show with even better form :

“It rekindled my desire to see [Game of Thrones] through. The characters are like real people to me, because I’ve been doing this for so long.”

Of course, when she returned for Season 7, she did an exceptional job. Fans might disagree on whether Season 7 was good storytelling or not, but there is no doubt the season had some of the best looking costumes we have ever seen on TV, reflecting the characters’ positions in the story. Clapton also works on the Netflix hit show, ‘The Crown’, and her next big project is a sequel to the Abba musical, Mamma Mia!, which she says she took up to get a change from the British accented serious dramas. The project, she says, has been quite tricky :

“Costumes [should] be witty, but not funny. Even though [the movie] is a bit of light frivolity, I still wanted to figure out why somebody is wearing something, that backstory. People pigeonhole you and think, ‘Oh, but you just do medieval stuff.’ Well, no. A designer does anything. A designer works with the script and the story, whether it’s real or period or musical or whatever.”

Michele has a lot of advice for aspiring costume designers, so go read the full interview, over here! Talk to us in the comments, down below!