It’s been almost a decade since Hannah Waddingham starred in Game of Thrones as Septa Unella, a devout follower of the Faith of the Seven that had taken control of King’s Landing in season five. Her character put Lena Headey’s Cersei Lannister through a series of public and private humiliations before Unella found herself on the receiving end. That punishment involved an intense waterboarding scene that still haunts Waddingham to this day.
“Thrones gave me something I wasn’t expecting from it, which was chronic claustrophobia,” Waddingham told Stephen Colbert, via Variety. “It was horrific. Ten hours of being actually waterboarded. Like actually. I’m strapped to a table with all these leather straps. I couldn’t lift up my head because I said that would be too obvious that it’s loose.”
However, while Waddingham has previously described the experience as the “worst day of her life” and a close second to childbirth, she told Colbert that torturing yourself for the hit HBO series was not uncommon:
“I’m on my way back [from set] with grape juice all in my hair so it went purple, I couldn’t speak because the Mountain had his hand over my mouth while I was screaming and I had strap marks everywhere like I had been attacked,” she continued. “One of the other guys who had been shooting something else was like, ‘You’re lucky, I’ve just been crawling through shit on my elbow for four days.’ It kind of doesn’t matter when you’re in Thrones. You just want to give the best.”
You can watch Waddingham talk Game of Thrones and The Fall Guy below:
(Via Variety)