Kit Harington Needed a Safe Word for When Jon Snow's Game of Thrones Battles Got Too Intense

Savage has shot most of Harington's action scenes, including season six's "Battle of the Bastards." Savage explained how he got the shot of Snow- or rather, Aegon Targaryen -getting trampled.

"And he [director Miguel Sapochnik] had an idea in Battle of the Bastards about Jon Snow being trampled and suffocated [by his own men as the army is surrounded by a narrowing wall of enemies] with a sort of water imagery, you know, like youre almost underwater. But when we did the sequence when Kit hits the ground, it wasnt working. There was no jeopardy in it, cause the stuntmen were trying to look after Kit, and Kits a really tough guy, hes gone through so much. [Laughs.]"

"I knew he could do it, so we basically just devised a shot where I straddled him with a lightweight handheld camera. Hes on the ground. It sounds a bit wanky, but we got six or seven stuntmen to fall onto Kit, three of which were on top of me, and I was like, 'Give him no quarter. Dont worry about me I can handle this.' I mean, Im like 61 and 16 stone [224 pounds]. And if you remember, Kit, I literally was screaming at you to get up, wasnt I?"

But just in case Harington felt unsafe during filming, he and Savage made sure that there was a safe word he could use to stop all the action.

"The funny thing was we had a, sort of, safe word. Which as I seemed to remember was-well, there was an episode in Family Guy where their safe word is 'banana,' which I thought we might as well go for," Savage explained.

So if season six was that intense, imagine how thrilling (and scary and heartbreaking and amazing) this season's battle of Winterfell will be.