Most fans probably don’t know the name Bernadette Caulfield. But this executive producer is considered a behind-the-scenes star of HBO’s epic drama.
“Game of Thrones” stars past and present filled Radio City Music Hall earlier this month for the world premiere of the first episode of the fantasy saga’s eighth and final season, which debuts Sunday on HBO. But in their speech before the screening, the creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss gave some of their deepest thanks to someone who wasn’t there and who most of the crowd probably wouldn’t recognize.
“We only made it this far because of Bernadette Caulfield, the greatest producer alive,” Benioff said.
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Caulfield, an executive producer for the show, isn’t as familiar to fans as Benioff or Weiss or actors like Emilia Clarke (who plays the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen), Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister). But for those people, she is the real star of “Game of Thrones.”
“She’s the beating heart of our show,” Clarke said.
“The woman that I want to grow up to be like,” Turner said.
“The true Mother of Dragons,” Headey said.
“The single best thing that ever happened to the show,” Benioff and Weiss wrote in a joint email.
Even as writers and showrunners have become celebrated in this age of intensely dissected series, television is still made mostly by the unsung — all those names in the credits that turn the scripts into actual television.
This is especially true for “Game of Thrones.” With its sprawling tale unfolding in a wide variety of environments, it was almost certainly the most technically complicated series ever made, at times running five units (film crews) simultaneously, on multiple continents, to complete a given season on time.
And they rarely shot simple scenes — “Game of Thrones” became a sensation partly through gobsmacking sequences involving elaborate battles, people on fire and the occasional bear. It inhabited cliffs, crypts and caves in Northern Ireland. It closed city streets in Spain and Croatia to film riots, insurgencies and a nude walk of shame. It took a crew into an Icelandic blizzard to capture the world beyond the Wall.
Whatever your feelings about the show itself, it is inarguably a marvel of scale and execution. (Over eight seasons, it used nearly 13,000 extras in Northern Ireland alone.) And if you ask nearly anyone associated with it who the linchpin holding the entire thing together was the answer is “Bernie.”
“Without her, the whole thing would have collapsed under its own weight long ago,” Benioff and Weiss said.
“Well, I wish I was that important,” Caulfield said when I reached her in England, where she’s working on Joss Whedon’s new series, “The Nevers,” for HBO. “But obviously it takes a major team to put it together.”
That team included her “wingman,” the producer Chris Newman, and the show’s production designer, Deborah Riley, among many, many others.
