I Guess This Is What CGI Is For (UPDATED)

(Spoiler alert for Game of Thrones season 5 and books 4-5.) The Game of Thrones producers are having trouble with a few permits they need to shoot the upcoming season. It turns out you can’t just film a woman parading naked through the streets of Dubrovnik—you need a permit to do that.

Fans of George R.R.Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books know that after Joffrey’s death and Tyrion’s escape, the increasingly unhinged Cersei runs afoul of the High Septon, the head of the Faith of the Seven in King’s Landing. It gets to a point where Cersei is imprisoned and, as punishment, is forced to make the ultimate walk of shame from “the Great Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep” while completely naked, in front of the entire city. It’s humiliating to the extreme, but also a vastly important scene in Cersei’s story.

But there’s a problem. GoT films its exterior King’s Landing shots in Croatia, where they needed to apply for a permit to allow actress Lena Headey to be filmed naked outside. But according to TMZ, the local Church of St. Nicholas very much disapproves of this, and has pressured the local film commission into denying the show the necessary permit.

So to be clear, a religious institution is forbidding to allow a woman to be naked out of doors to play a woman ordered to be naked out of doors by another a religious institution. That’s wacky.

The showrunners reportedly don’t plan on dropping the scene, so I guess Lena Headey will be naked in front of a greenscreen, like in 300 (NSFW link).

I do sort of wonder if the objection is primarily to the public nudity, or if the religiously-forced nature of the public nudity is a factor at all. That’s assuming local church leaders know the details of the storyline, and didn’t just react to news of impending nakedness.

UPDATE (09/01/2014): Problem solved, I guess.

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