And it’s… underutilizing Mord the Jailer.
“One thing I know I wish we could have done is there’s the character Mord the Jailer,” Benioff told The Hollywood Reporter writer-at-large James Hibberd.
“It was a mistake not bringing Mord the Jailer back into it,” Weiss said. “We always talked about doing it.”
Here’s a refresher: Mord is a character who appears in season one of “Game of Thrones.” After Tyrion Lannister is arrested at Catelyn Stark’s behest, on account of the assassination attempt against her son Bran and the killing of Lord John Arryn, he’s tossed into the dungeon at the Eyrie. There, Mord is his bludgeon-happy jailer — but after Tyrion convinces Mord to get him an audience with Lady Arryn, he pays Mord back with a bag of gold. (You may remember the phrase, “A Lannister always pays his debts.”)
The creators told THR that they missed the chance to engineer Mord’s triumphant return during a tavern scene later in the series.
“We realized too late that Mord could have owned the tavern,” Weiss said. “We could have had that actor in the background acting exact the way he did as a jailer, except now as a small business owner. It was just such an obvious, no-brainer, day-after idea.”
Benioff and Weiss, Hibberd wrote in a cover story about the pair’s new show “3 Body Problem,” generally avoid publicly criticizing “Game of Thrones” because they feel that it wouldn’t benefit anyone who worked on the series, including them.
There’s been plenty of discourse around “Game of Thrones” regardless, even without its creators’ voices. After becoming one of HBO’s biggest hits, the series’ eighth and final season ended with a divisive bang.
“You always hope everyone’s going to love anything you do and it would’ve been great if 100 percent of people loved it, but they didn’t,” Benioff told THR. “You can get so bogged down in public opinion that you spend your whole life googling things and trying to find people who felt one way or the other way.”