Based on a long-running series of brutal fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, HBO’s Game of Thrones is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed TV shows ever. And why wouldn’t it. It’s got everything that makes anything good: epic battles, every good British actor in history, dragons, hand to hand combat, Pete Dinklage, nuns shouting “shame!”, dragons, murdered child kings, conspiracies, alliances, resurrections, a cool made-up language (Dothraki), and, because it’s on HBO, excessive nudity. (It’s got to be the first show with both dragons and prostitutes to win the Emmy for Best Drama.) Watching Game of Thrones every Sunday night has been a hallmark of Spring since 2011, except this year, when filming of season 7 was pushed back, thus pushing back the premiere of new episodes. So, to tide you over until the show airs, here some cool facts about the incredibly intricate world of Westeros and all the people hell-bent on taking control of it.
1. More than 150 babies were named “Khaleesi” in 2012.
2. The fastest-growing baby name in the U.S. is Arya, as in Arya Stark. Also gaining in popularity: Maisie, as in Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark.
3. Gwendoline Christie, who plays Brienne of Tarth, doesn’t know the actual date of her birth, only that she was born in 1978.
4. Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark, adopted the dog that played her dire wolf in the show. It was named Lady on the show, but Turner renamed it Zunni.
5. That horse’s heart that Daenerys had to eat for Khal Drago was actually a three-pound gummy bear-like thing.
6. Since Peter Dinklage is a vegetarian, all the meat that he eats on.the show isn’t real.
7. Game of the Thrones is the first acting that Maisie Williams has ever done.
8. Jerome Flynn plays Bronn, but before that he was in a ’90s R&B duo called Robson and Jerome. They had three no. 1 hits in England.
9. There’s a descendant of Charlie Chaplin on the show. Or their was; Oona Chaplin, who played the late wife of Robb Stark, is Chaplin’s granddaughter.
10. Harry Lloyd plays Daenerys’s brother, Viserys. Lloyd is the great-great-great grandson of Charles Dickens.
11. The guy who plays Theon is Alfie Allen, and his sister is pop singer Lily Allen. Her hit “Alfie” is about how he used to smoke too much pot.
12. Thomas Brodie-Sangster plays Bran’s companion. He started playing the role at 13, when he was 23 in real life.
13. He’s also the little kid who learns to play the drums (Liam Neeson’s son) in Love Actually.
14. Brodie-Sangster also did the voice of Ferb on Phineas and Ferb.
15. For some reason they changed the name of Theon’s sister from Asha in the books to Yara on the show.
16. The Dothraki language has a vocabulary of about 3,000 words that a linguist created just for the show.
17. A part of the language gets its name from fantasy fan Dwight Schrute from The Office. It’s called the Shrutean Compound.
18. Hodor: Here’s Hodor without his beard. Hodor.
19. Maisie Williams (Sansa) and (Sophie Turner) Arya are really close friends offscreen.
20. There exists a Game of Thrones porn parody called Game of Bones. (It’s got slightly more nudity than Game of Thrones.)
21. There’s a connection between the Harry Potter universe and Game of Thrones. Stephen Dillane plays Stannis Baratheon. His son is Frank Dillane, who played Tom Riddle. (And he now plays Nick on Fear the Walking Dead.)
22. George R.R. Martin’s first choice to play Tyrion: Peter Dinklage.
23. Before Thrones, one of the roles Dinklage was best known for was as the sexy voiced “wake-up guy” on Seinfeld.
24. Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey play siblings, and they were good friends before the show. Dinklage helped Headey get the part of Cersei Lannister.
25. Jack Gleason—King Joffrey—played a little boy in Batman Begins. He was credited as “Little Boy.”
26. Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys on the show, does not dye her hair blonde. She wears a wig instead.
27. But Sophie Turner, who plays redheaded Sansa, has blonde hair in real life.
28. George R.R. Martin divulged how the book series will end to the TV’s show producers, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, should he for some reason not live to finish writing the novels.
29. Several of the actors on the show claim to have not read any of the source novels, with some of the them saying they fear it’ll affect their performance if they know what ultimately happens to their character.
30. Like Maester Aernon of the Night’s Watch, the character he played, Peter Vaughan was blind in real life.
31. If you’d ever like to see the guy who plays Robert Baratheon almost totally nude, you can see Mark Addy in The Full Monty.
32. If you’d like to see Robert Baratheon as a befuddled suburban dad, you could watch him on the 2000s CBS sitcom Still Standing.
33. After his first appearance on the show, Jack Gleeson, who played Joffrey got a letter from George R.R. Martin. It read, “Congratulations, everyone hates you.”
34. After getting covered in sticky fake blood while filming a gory scene, Emilia Clark became stuck to a toilet seat.
35. The show is credited with inventing the concept of “sexposition”—delivering important plot points (exposition) while lots of graphic sex scenes are going on.
36. Without a long beard and scars, this is what The Hound looks like.
37. This is what The Hound looks like in a commercial for porridge.
38. The Wall is based on a real wall: Hadrian’s Wall, from the Roman era of Britain.
39. The actress who plays Shae, Tyrion’s mistress, got her start doing pornographic films.
40 The severed head of George W. Bush shows up impaled on a spear during the first season of the show. The one with the long wig on the left is the one.
41. In the first season of the show, the dire wolves were real dogs—the Northern Inuit breed.
42. In season 2 and beyond, the dire wolves are taken from real footage of wolves that’s digitally inserted.
43. Julian Glover, the guy who plays Grand Maester Pycelle, is this guy: General Veers from The Empire Strikes Back and Walter Donovan from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:
44. The actress who plays Catelyn Stark, Michelle Fairley, played Hermione’s mother in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
45. The first movie role ever for Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) was the 2001 war movie Black Hawk Down.
46. Emilia Clark (Daenerys) provided the voice for Dr. Zoidberg’s girlfriend on Futurama.
47. The first pilot that was filmed for Game of Thrones has never been released.
48. Here’s what Diana Rigg, who plays the the Queen of Thorns, looked like back in the ’60s.
49. And here’s what it looks like when Hodor and Arya are DJing. (Hodor.)
