He may be the strongest man in the world, but even Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson needed a stunt double for the upcoming season of Game of Thrones. In an interview with Mashable, the Icelandic strongman, and current title holder of “World’s Strongest Man,” revealed that he needed a stunt double while filming the eighth and final season of GoT.
This is remarkable for a number of reasons. First off, Björnsson has never needed a stunt double before, because he has done all his own stunts in previous seasons. This raises the question: what in Westeros did the directors need his character to do that Björnsson couldn’t do?
In the interview, Björnsson is tight-lipped about what these stunts may have entailed. “I can’t go into details you know,” he says, which is fair, but only leaves room for speculation about how epic this season is going to be if The Mountain needed a stunt double.
The second question we have about the additional “Mountain” is who did they find to be the stunt double? Björnsson is 6 feet 9 inches tall and weighs in at around 400 lbs. There are not too many people out there that size, let alone actors with stunt training.
Björnsson says of his stunt double, “He was big. He was tall, not as muscular, but he was taller and big.”
Did they gather up a college theater troop of aspiring British actors to stand on top of each other in a suit of armor like little kids in a trench coat? Did they get one of the taller production assistants on set to take up Björnsson’s diet of 300 grams of rib-eye steak per day to get The Mountain’s incredible mass? Will it be revealed that Gregor Clegane has a secret identical twin and they needed the stunt double film scenes of them together like Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap?
The possibilities are endless.
Because his character’s role is smaller this season, Björnsson doesn’t know much about the plot of the season outside of his character’s own arc, but assures viewers that “its going to be an amazing season.”
Björnsson’s body was essentially made to withstand anything, so if he thought filming this new season was hard, we can’t even imagine what the rest of the cast had to go through.
