It’s one of the best-known catchphrases from the books and TV show, but it seems that a Lannister does always truly pay his debts after all.
One of the stars of the fantasy drama Game of Thrones, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister), has become an unlikely hero in Seville – after coughing up the entrance fee to the city’s Alcázar Palace, despite the fact the TV show was filming there.
The hit HBO show has been on location in Seville since last Monday, and parts of the palace have been off-limits to tourists while filming on season five is underway.
Last week, Danish actor Coster-Waldau was almost barred from the set, when staff at the popular tourist attraction failed to recognise him, and requested he present his ticket before going inside the Alcázar complex.
But instead of throwing a strop, the actor walked back to the ticket office, and paid the €9.50 admission price. And then made his way back on set.
"He didn't say anything," a staff member at the palace said.
The Alcázar Palace is one of the oldest royal buildings still in use in Europe, and is now one of several locations in the Spanish region of Andalusia being used on Game of Thrones. The province is acting as a stand-in for Dorne, the peninsula that makes the southern-most part of the fictional world of Westeros, in fantasy writer George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones universe.
Other regions in that universe are filmed in Northern Ireland.
The arrival of the crew to Seville is being viewed as a huge boost to Spain, which expects to see a rise in tourism as fans of the show come to see where it was made. Dubrovnik, the Croatian city where three seasons of the show were filmed, has noted a tourism boost since the show aired.
But the presence of the show in Spain has not been without some controversy; as the country struggles with the second-highest unemployment rate in the EU, producers calls for extras that were “slim and without tattoos” were met with some criticism.
Fresco Film Services, based in Malaga, reported that it received 86,000 applications to fill the 550 extra roles.
In July, Spanish police detained two men in Ibiza who were using a fake website to recruit extras in the show’s name. The site instructed would-be performers to call a premium telephone line that left the callers on hold for several minutes.
According to police reports, the pair earned as much as €100,000 in a week from their scam.
