Hannah Waddingham developed “chronic claustrophobia” while filming Game of Thrones

Dreams of drowning and gasping for air are among the most typical nightmares people have. For a torturous ten hours, a Game of Thrones actress had to endure it in real on set. On the program, Hannah Waddingham, who portrayed Septa Unella, was restrained to a table and subjected to torture by Lena Headey’s Cersei Lannister. The scene made her claustrophobic, according to Waddingham.

Game of Thrones gave Hannah Waddingham a case of claustrophobia

Hannah Waddingham spent hours being waterboarded, or ‘wineboarded’ as the scene suggests, on Game of Thrones. Recalling the incident on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she said, “Thrones gave me something I wasn’t expecting from it and that is chronic claustrophobia.”

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“I have talked about it since with David Benioff and Dan Weiss, the two exec producers on it, I was like, ‘Good job it’s for them because it was horrific.’ [I had] 10 hours of being actually waterboarded, like actually waterboarded. The reason why I don’t believe [Game of Thrones] is touched yet in terms of the cinematography of it for a series, it’s just a different level.  But with that comes actual waterboarding.”

Hannah Waddingham kept her ‘shame’ bell from Game of Thrones

Despite filming the horrific sequence, Waddingham doesn’t regret doing the scene. In fact, she still has the iconic ‘shame’ bell from the show. On a visit to the Kelly Clarkson show, the singer asked her, “I also loved you in Game of Thrones. First of all, I heard that you kept the bell from ‘Shame, Shame.’”

“Yes,” Waddingham confirmed, “That’s when you know your character is really dead, when they give you the hero thing. ‘And thank you very much and goodbye.’”

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