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Actress Hannah Waddingham Says She Was Waterboarded On 'Game of Thrones' Set for 10 Hours

Actress Hannah Waddingham Says She Was Waterboarded On 'Game of Thrones' Set for 10 Hours

Ted Lasso‘s Hannah Waddingham is opening up about the second worse day of her life where she was waterboarded on the set of Game of Thrones.

If you don’t recognize Hannah, she portrayed Unella in the hit HBO series. Her character served under the cult leader-ish High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce) and is one of the famous characters who shouts “shame” during Cersei’s walk of atonement.

Click inside to see what Hannah shared about being waterboarded on set…

During one famous episode, Cersei (Lena Headey) gets her revenge and waterboards Unella.

“I was strapped to a wooden table with proper big straps for 10 hours,” Hannah told Collider. “And definitely, other than childbirth, it was the worst day of my life. Because Lena was uncomfortable pouring liquid in my face for that long, and I was beside myself. But in those moments you have to think, do you serve the piece and get on with it or do you chicken out and go, ‘No, this isn’t what I signed up for, blah, blah, blah?’”

She added, “The funny thing was, after we’d finished shooting it for the whole day, and people like Miguel Sapochnik, the director by the way, walking past with a cup of tea and a sandwich on-the-go and going, ‘Hi hunny, you alright?’ And I was like, ‘Not really. The crew have just been saying we are actually really waterboarding you here.’ And I was like, ‘Yup, you don’t need to tell me that!’”

Why the waterboarding scene actually happened? Hannah explained, “She was meant to be raped by The Mountain, and I think they’d had so many complaints about the rape of Sansa [Sophie Turner] that they chose not to go with it.”

“When I got back to the hotel that night, I was going up in the left and I was standing next to Eugene [Simon who played Lancel Lannister] who had had to crawl through loads of sh*t to get out of the Sept of Baylor and he was like, ‘Oh my god, what happened to you today?’ I could barely speak because I had been screaming through The Mountain’s hand, which is quite frightening as a singer to completely lose your voice, so I had no voice at all to barely whisper, bruises already coming up like I had been attacked and I was like, ‘I’ve basically just been waterboarded for ten hours.’ And he went, ‘Mate, I’ve just been crawling through sh*t for four days on my elbows.’ So we were like, ‘See? You haven’t been in Game of Thrones unless you’ve been really, really, battered around,’” she added.

Another Game of Thrones star recently revealed a big difference in the way the women and men were treated on set.

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