#from having a minor role named 'boy e' as his first acting gig

[chrismequick]

Meguro Ren, Rookie actor of the Year awards (2022)

Kinema Junpo (for 月の満ち欠け& おそ松さん movies)

Japan Academy Awards (for 月の満ち欠けmovie)

Hashida Awards (for silent & 舞いあがれ! tv dramas)

[ghoulpiled]

ʟᴏꜱ ᴀɢᴇʟᴇꜱꜱ || Teaser

𝙷𝚘𝚠 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚢𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞? 𝙷𝚘𝚠 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚢𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞? 𝙷𝚘𝚠 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚢𝚋𝚘𝚍𝚢 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚒𝚛 𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚜 𝚝𝚘𝚘?

❧𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠: Pre-War!Cooper Howard x fem!Reader

❧𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧g: E / MATURE! Minors, DO NOT interact!

❧ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ: nothing yet but it will get really explicit

❧𝐋𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐭𝐡: ~1200 words

❧𝐒𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: You're an up and coming actress and he's America's sweetheart. (WIP summary)

❧ɴᴏᴛᴇ: This is my current WIP but be prepared for it to be so much longer and juicer and drama filled. I just wanted to get this out so y'all can see I am indeed COOKING !!! Also, A Man and His Dog was based off of A Boy and His Dog so that is what I based it off of!

You have been in the acting game for far too long. Originally you were advertising royalty. Your mom first put you into commercial gigs at the young age of five. Luckily for your mom, BlamCo Mac & Cheese was looking for the new poster child. Your face was plastered on billboards all around Hollywood. “Nothing says dinner like BlamCo Mac & Cheese. Bring the family together for a dish everyone will enjoy.” This phrase will forever be etched into the grooves of your brain. But as all gigs go, you outgrew BlamCo. Once you hit age ten, you couldn’t be the cutesy little kid telling families to eat the most disgusting mac and cheese known to man. Like many gigs will do, you were dropped from the gig. It paid well. Well, it paid your mom well.

She would go on lavish vacations without you. Only leaving you with a babysitter. This babysitter ended up raising you. Your mom would also buy herself expensive dresses and handbags. What would you get? Hand Me downs of whatever wardrobe on commercials could give you. This was a common theme early on in your career. The money you made was promised to you once you hit eighteen. Enough money to go to college and make a name for yourself professionally. After the BlamCo gig, you hit a dry spell. No one wanted a kid going through puberty as the face of their brand. With money getting tight, your mom signed you up for every and any background character role in a film and TV show she could. That’s where Nuka Cola noticed you.

Upon hitting sixteen, Nuka Cola representatives came up to your mom offering you a four year contract to be the face of Nuka Cola. It paid insanely well. So you did it. Another gig with your face plastered everywhere. From highway billboards to full body cut outs of you in Red Rockets across the country, you were back in the limelight. But those four years went by quickly. Once the contract ended, you were eighteen. You were excited to throw your acting career away. Child stardom was too damn much. College was going to be a fresh start for you! To no one’s surprise, you never got your money. To make it worse, your mom kicked you out of the house. She didn’t see you as profitable anymore. Mainly because you are old enough to go your own way.

Due to all these gigs, you never had time to make friends. So you took to crashing on random old co-star’s couches. You were back to background gigs. Which paid okay but not enough to help pay for college. Sadly, that was a dream you could never catch. It took three years for you to finally get your foot back in the door with big acting gigs. That gig being A Man and His Dog. A film in which you play the main female character who is supposed to seduce the main lead. It wasn’t really a film expected to go anywhere. The lead was a man straight out of the Sino-American War who had never acted a day in his life. This was also your first big gig, you’re not one to talk. Unknown to you, that man would become western movie royalty. A young and disgruntled Cooper Howard.

First day on set was odd. No one really talked to you. Not even the director. There was no way you were to know if you were doing the role justice. They had you in a wedding dress with white face paint. It was embarrassing. You stand near your trailer, lighting up a cigarette during lunch. Rent was due that night and you had no money to pay it. If this gig didn’t make a lot of money, you’re screwed. With a shaky breath, you look down at the ground. You’re getting cigarette ash all over this dress. Wardrobe is going to kill you.

“Now what’s a pretty thing like you doing out here all alone?”

The southern voice takes you out of your thoughts as you look up. You rub your eyes, messing up the makeup you have on. Now your hand is stained white. Great. Cooper walks over to you before leaning against your trailer. He takes out a cigarette of his own and begins to smoke with you. This is the first person to speak with you and it's the lead of the film. You try to act natural but you’re smitten. There is some charm he holds. Maybe it’s the fact you’re playing weird lovers in the film or the fact you have never been in contact with such a gorgeous man before. This moment right now makes you realize you’ve never had your first kiss. Your life has been acting gig after acting gig. No time for personal relationships.

“Are ya just gon’ stare at me?” He chuckles, voice smooth like whiskey.

You clear your throat and shake your head.

“Sorry, I’m not used to small talk.” Is all you can truly muster.

He offers you a kind smile. One that feels like sickly sweet honey on a hot day. It makes your stomach flutter with butterflies. He already has you wrapped around his finger. Maybe it’s the southern drawl that burns like a good bourbon. He is one hell of a charmer.

“Ain’t small talk unless you want it to be.” He takes a long drag from his cigarette, licking his bottom lip.

“You’re killing it by the way. The director is- pardon my language- a dick.” Cooper scoffs, shaking his head. He flicks his cigarette onto the ground and stomps on it which causes you to do it to your own.

You can’t help but chuckle at that.

“You can tell me that.” You turn to face him, leaning against your own trailer.

Maybe this set wouldn’t be as bad as you thought.

-

During set, you would crash at Cooper’s apartment. A tiny place near filming. You ended up getting evicted because you couldn’t afford rent. It was only logical you still find somewhere to crash. You’re lucky you became close with Cooper. He’s a gentleman. Made you feel at home. You opened up about your childhood and he opened up about war.

War. It was a scary thing. His stories kept you on the edge of your seat. Here you were, thinking you had a tough past. Almost all of Cooper’s friends are dead because of the war. You could only comfort him.

-

After filming wrapped, you were thrusted into the world of press. The press tour with Cooper was something else. The director wanted you two to lean into a facade. He wanted the both of you to act like lovers. This was to sell the film, lean into that romance your two characters had. You couldn’t flirt for shit without a script. Cooper, however, was a complete natural.

You followed Cooper’s lead. You know it was all an act but you were falling for him. Hard. He was the first man to ever give you the time of day. You knew it was fake flirting but every blush that he caused was real. The film ended up being big enough to push both Cooper and you into the spotlight. Now you’re landing gigs like crazy as well as him.

You both play lovers again in another western B-film. This one didn’t have the same success as the prior film but it was still another film you did with Cooper.

Part One

[groovyzombiellama]

The Golden/Stylish Trio

Title: The Golden/Stylish Trio

Requested? Yes.

Plot: You are an actress and shoot a project with Alex and Bill and the two of them have a crush on you.

Word count: 1617

—***—

Ever since you were a child, you knew that you wanted to be an actress, and it didn’t matter how many people told you that you shouldn’t dream so high and that you were gonna fail, that just made you want to work more just to prove them wrong. You were constantly told that you wouldn’t have enough work, and that being an actress is stressful and difficult. Of course you knew that, in their own way every job is difficult, but you didn’t mind it because you knew that you would have difficult moments, but you were ready for whatever that world had to throw at you, because at least  that way, you would be doing something you love. You had the support of your immediate family, like your parents in the first place, and so you decided to take a chance and start your path towards making your dreams come true.

At first you had it quite difficult, not really being what the casting agent was looking for, both in terms of character and in your lack of experience. You had sleepless nights thinking about how you were supposed to gather experience when nobody wanted to give you a chance to gain any of it. And you expected this, so it wasn’t a surprise to you, and it just motivated you to do better and go to some classes and stuff, but that doesn’t mean getting rejected so many times didn’t hurt you. There were times where you would feel like the people who told you that you wouldn’t be able to make it were right and that you should just give up and go back home. Your family was alright with you coming back and going to college for something else, but just like your friends, they believed that you could do it and that every beginning is hard, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t succeed. And indeed, with patience, it started happening, you started getting cast.

Of course, you wouldn’t be able to get a lead role right off the bat, but you were getting work as eather a background character, or a very minor character that maybe had one or two lines. And even though it was something small and didn’t mean a lot of camera time, you were still extatic and extremly grateful and happy to even be getting any work at all. Your portfolio was growing, your list of work experience was becoming longer and longer, and a lot of casting agents saw your passion and dedication to acting, to the point where you even got cast as a supporting character in a movie, the so called “best friend trope”, and your lines consisted of pep talks and you were honestly just there to lift up the lead character. But it was the longest time you had spent in front of the camera so far and the most speaking lines you had gotten, so to say you were grateful and excited would be understatements.

You had no idea where all of this was gonna take you, but you were so proud of yourself for not giving up on your dreams. You even sent tickets for that movie to your cousins who didn’t believe you could make it and some of the people who bullied you and said you would never amount to nothing. It wasn’t to spite them, not too much anyway, because you never were a person to hold a grudge or feel good if others are feeling down. You just wanted to tell them that hard work will always pay off and that hard work can beat talent if talent doesn’t work hard. You were getting recognized and it was blowing your mind to be walking down the street and hear people talking about you as you pass them, guessing if you were the girl they had seen in that movie. And it made you smile every time. Eventually you ended up getting an e-mail that changed your life in a drastic way. A huge gig, bigger than any you have had before, with actors that you admired.

You had known Bill Skarsgård from his role as Roman Godfrey in Hemlock Groove, and as the iconic clown, Pennywise, in the most recent IT movies. And when your agent told you that he was gonna be one of your costars, you had to sit down, as your legs felt like they were gonna give out. He always seemed like a truly pleasant person to be around and an actor who really cares about the craft. And his good looks were just a bonus to a very amazing person. And that was the case for your other costar who once again gave you that feeling that you were gonna collapse if you keep standing. The Ivar the Boneless from Vikings, Victor from Outsiders, Alex Høgh Andersen. Alex always had the appeal as a literal ray of sunshine to you and it made your head feel dizzy to be working with them at all, and even when you met them, you couldn’t believe it was true.

Both Bill and Alex found you adorable as you tried not to fangirl around them, and be your cool self, or at least what you thought was cool. Bill had known about you as he had watched one of the movies you were in and he admired the way you put everything you had into your character, so he already knew some things about you, but even with that, you had managed to amaze him beyong belief. To Alex. meeting you was completely new territory, but he was enjoying every second of it, seeing the way every part of you contained the character you were supposed to potray. Even your eyes would show the emotion your character was supposed to be feeling that both men were dangerously close to apologising to you the moment they looked into your eyes as you were filming a scene where you were supposed to have a disagreement or fight.

Both Alex and Bill felt like they were learning a lot from you, as much as you were learning from them. And your vibrant personality, combined with that smile of yours were enough for them to develp crushes on you. It amazed them that neither one of them was able to say anything to you, that when it came to you, they would feel nervous or get tongue tied. When the two of them were talking and you came up, the shock on both of their faces, wide eyed expressions were almost comical as they realised the second they started talking about you that they had crushes on you. They didn’t want to make this a rivalry between them and try to win you over from one or the other. They were gonna leave the choice to you if you ever developped feelings for one of them and the other was gonna support you both. But that didn’t stop them from admiring you constantly and gushing about you in interviews and to each other.

As more time passed, the more the three of you started getting closer, so much so that they put up with the silly nicknames that you gave them and even though Billy and Lexie weren’t their favorite, and they honestly prefered some of your more creative nicknames, or standard “love” or “hun” that you loved calling people who were important to you, they cared about you enough to accept you just the way you were, which meant the world to you. Bill’s brother Gustaf was really glad that his costar from Vikings was friends with his brother, because the cast of the show had become like his second family in a way, and now you were a very dear friend to all of them.

Every interview that you did with these boys was a blast, you would always have fun and if they even sensed that you were feeling uncomfortable with a question or something, the both of them would create a diversion, as you woke up in them the feeling to be protective over you, but not too much that you feel suffocated, but just enough for people to know that you were not someone to mess with, both because of you being a strong and independent woman, and also because you had the two of them who had your back as much you had theirs. You three were truly a great trio, and your friendship was one that you were sure was for the books and that it was gonna last.

Regardless of the fact that their crushes were growing by the day and often times they had to stop themselves from spending entire interviews talking about you, they never forced you into anything, or tried to convince you that one of them was better for you than the other. And their biggest pet peeve was when you didn’t believe in yourself and always claimed that “people were just too kind to you” whenever someone complimented you, because they just wanted you to know that to them you were absolutely amazing and to so many people who were fans of you. But they appreciated that you were kinda using that to keep your humble nature, worried that if you started giving yourself that much credit, you would become vain and too self absorbed. They were thankful that they met you and hoped your friendship lasted a long time, even if nothing more developped from it. You were the Golden Trio, named by the entertainement industry, or the Stylish Trio as fans started calling you after Alex’s post, and you were happy with it.

---***---

SURPRISE @walkxthexmoon !! You wanted either one of aus that I do, but you were always sweet to me and kind, that you get all of it, written, gif and social media au :D <3 I truly hope you like it :)

I appreciate all of you guys and thank you all for your follows, likes, reblogs, I’ll never be able to thank you all enough. Every time I get an e-mail telling me someone followed me, it makes my entire week better and keeps me motivated! So thank you to all of you, I love you all so much, and if people are nice to me I do my damnest to be 10x nicer, because you deserve it back, so this fic took a lot longer to make than I thought, and hopefully it’s a good one and you guys like it, and just once again, I appreaciate all of you <3

[samstiels-deactivated20201212]

This is a really good article. Idk how much people know about Cogman, but he wrote the episode where Sansa was raped, and was immediately chased off all social media by angry fans. There is an incredible paragraph explaining his reasonings for the scene, and Sophie Turner’s as well. Cogman also wrote most of Jaime x Brienne scenes, and was the driving force behind most of the actual plot that makes sense, including Brienne being knighted.   

Vanity Fair gives 3 free articles per month, then requires a subscription, so you’ll find the whole article under the cut. 

Before the cast and crew of Game of Thrones threw themselves into their final season of grueling night shoots, dragon rides, and death scenes, they gathered in Belfast for one last table read. It was the largest group ever assembled for such an occasion, all crammed in around a massive conference table made from the soaring gates of the show's lavish Season Two city of Qarth. HBO executives and trusted friends of the show lined the edges of the room as, over two days, everyone finally learned how the saga of Westeros would end.

Kit Harington had tears streaming down his face; Liam Cunningham, who played the salty Ser Davos, was cursing a blue streak. Halfway through the read, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau reached out to squeeze the shoulder of co-executive producer Bryan Cogman, who had started trembling as the body count on the page started to rise. In the end it was Cogman—who had read out every stage direction at every table read since the first in 2009—who had the final word that day: “End of Game of Thrones.” More than a year later, Sophie Turner still isn't over it. “That motherfucker,” she says with a laugh.

“It was a lovefest,” Cogman says of that table read, when the often brutal conditions of shooting seemed a world away. “And then we went and made the show and wanted to kill each other 11 months later.”

Turner, who began playing Sansa Stark when she was 13, says Cogman is the backbone of Game of Thrones. Coster-Waldau, who played Jaime Lannister, refers to him as the “walking encyclopedia.” But George R. R. Martin, who wrote the books that show-runners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss adapted into what may be the last universally agreed-upon hit TV show, leans on his own Westerosi mythology to pay the highest compliment: “Dave and Dan—even though there were two of them, there really needed to be three. Bryan was the third head of the dragon.”

Hired as Weiss and Benioff's assistant when Game of Thrones first began production, Cogman wrote 11 episodes of the series—second only to the show-runners and more than Martin himself—and as a producer has three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series displayed in his living room. Martin personally asked Cogman to pitch a Thrones prequel series to HBO; when the network passed, he moved on to a deal at Amazon Studios, where, to borrow another phrase from Martin's books, he can cast a very large shadow of his own on this post-Thrones universe.

“You're only number two on the biggest show of all time once,” Cogman says, aware that Thrones-sized success may be a thing of the past for television as a whole. “So what do you want to do with that opportunity when the show ends? You try to see if you can tell your own stories.”

More than 10 years ago, Weiss and Benioff had finally convinced both HBO and Martin that they were the right pick to turn Game of Thrones into what they called “The Sopranos meets Middle-earth.” But they had a problem: neither of them knew the first thing about TV. Luckily, Benioff knew someone who did—his nanny's husband.

Once just another Juilliard-trained actor struggling to make it in Hollywood, Cogman first caught Benioff's eye with a script about, well, struggling actors trying to make it in Hollywood. Fed up with jobs that include a telemarketing gig in the Valley selling toner cartridges—a job that theater nerd Cogman describes as “like Glengarry Glen Ross, but worse”—and with watching former classmates like Lee Pace and Anthony Mackie smile down at him from 14-foot billboards, the then 28-year-old Cogman was attempting to re-write his way out of a familiar story of Hollywood despair.

Benioff, best known at the time for well-received novels such as the one he adapted into the 2002 Spike Lee movie 25th Hour, liked what he saw but didn't have a job for Cogman yet. So he called in a favor to his childhood friend NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman and landed Cogman a job as the executive's assistant (there were two others) and driver. Cogman nearly wrecked Silverman's car on his second night behind the wheel.

“You're a terrible driver,” Cogman recalls Silverman saying, “but I like hanging out with you.” Perhaps in an attempt to protect the paint on his other cars, Silverman eventually got his driver a writers'-assistant job, fetching coffee and the like, on an NBC show: My Own Worst Enemy, which ended after just two months, in December 2008.

However short-lived, the show was an education for Cogman in the basics of breaking a story for television. When Weiss and Benioff snapped up Cogman as their own assistant, they set up shop in a dingy suite of now demolished offices on the former Pickford-Fairbanks Studios lot and asked the guy who thought he was just there to fetch lunches where they should start.

“I got my marker and David sat in his chair and Dan sat in his,” Cogman remembers. Without any other staff hired, the three of them went to work figuring out how to introduce TV audiences to the scheming Lannisters, the honorable Starks, the looming Wall, Daenerys Targaryen and her three baby dragons. “None of us knew really what we were doing. No one was really bothering us or telling us we were doing it wrong. We cooked up Season One, the three of us in that room in the winter and early spring of 2009.”

Cogman still likes to joke that the only reason he got the job is because Benioff—who was about to set off to Europe with his wife, actor Amanda Peet—wanted to hold on to the excellent child care provided by Cogman's wife, actor Mandy Olsen. “That backfired! As soon as I became a TV writer, she quit,” Cogman says, laughing. “Joke's on you, Benioff!”

Tipped off by his wife to Benioff's early interest in the books, Cogman had read the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series in the hope of a small role in the show—“Maybe I'll get to play a guy with a spear!” By the time he was in the room with Weiss and Benioff, Cogman had started re-reading—he estimates he's read the first book, A Game of Thrones, at least 20 times now—and boiling down the dense and complicated world of Westeros into digestible outlines, family trees, and quick little summaries. “We thought we knew the books pretty well, but Bryan was just on a different level,” Weiss and Benioff wrote in a joint e-mail. That work landed Cogman a seat in every meeting and was a godsend to every confused HBO executive, director, production designer, and actor.

The show-runners quickly deviated from the Hollywood norm of treating their assistant like a glorified errand boy; while working on Season One, they surprised Cogman with an offer to write his own episode, “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things.” As Weiss and Benioff recalled, “We'd never written a season of television before, and we'd underestimated how long it would take. Then we looked across the room and there was Bryan. Smart, tireless, passionate Bryan. Sure, he wasn't experienced, but hell, neither were we.”

Martin's review of Cogman's work was straightforward: “An excellent episode! Straight from my books!”

Weiss and Benioff dubbed Cogman “lore master”; Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth, jokes, “I have never once seen Bryan with George R. R. Martin, and the rumor is that they could be the same person.” Martin, for his part, likens Cogman to the helpful and well-read character Samwell Tarly, a comparison the author usually reserves for himself. As the series grew bigger and Martin repeatedly delayed the release of his final books in the series, the author grew noticeably distant from the show, with no writing credits after Season Four and no recent appearances at the splashy premiere events until the final one, in April. Responding on his LiveJournal to a controversial Season Five scene that differed dramatically from the books, Martin described the show and his work as “two roads diverging in the dark of the woods, I suppose … but all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place.”

Martin hasn't commented much on his relationship with HBO and the series, but he is unreserved in his praise for Cogman: “I feel simpatico with Bryan,” Martin says. “He's helped keep the show true to my books, and the characters true to the characters I created, which may not be important to everybody in the world, but is certainly important to me.”

In the beginning Cogman clung doggedly to some less essential parts of the books. (He's now mortified to recount a fight he picked over cutting a minor Season One character named Marillion. “Nearly in tears! Over Marillion! And I was the fucking assistant.”) But he also used his book knowledge to suggest killing off Ned Stark in the ninth episode of the first season, rather than saving it for the finale, a shock that went on to define the high stakes of the series. Cogman, a lifelong student of drama, knows how differently stories can play when acted out. So while others may compare Cogman to Samwell Tarly, he favors another character: Varys, the slick spymaster who uses political maneuvers and access to the most powerful players to keep himself in the game. Or, at least, he says, “I'm the good parts of Varys.”

From the very start Cogman homed in on the basic character details that made Thrones a success beyond its spectacle. “It's about one buddy going back to his old buddy's house for dinner,” he says, describing the simple power of the pilot. “If you don't have that, then you have a lot of other imitators that have come along since and haven't been as good.”

Production on Game of Thrones was massive from the start, and Weiss and Benioff quickly put Cogman in charge of some pivotal scenes at the end of Season One, featuring Peter Dinklage's Tyrion Lannister and his scathing father, Tywin Lannister, played by Charles Dance. Cogman, who claims he didn't know any better, wielded so much authority that director Alan Taylor just assumed he was a producer. “Why the hell have I been taking orders from you the past few months?” Cogman recalls Taylor joking when he discovered the truth.

The show sprawled after Season One, with at least two units—named the Dragon and the Wolf—shooting simultaneously. Weiss and Benioff leveraged their titles to take charge of the sets in exotic and temperate Spain, Croatia, and Morocco, leaving Cogman as their man on the ground in Belfast, where the show filmed the bulk of its interior scenes.

In Belfast, Cogman worked on behalf of Weiss and Benioff as fastidious keeper of the script, earning the nickname “Shakespeare” from Dance when he insisted that a line be read word for word. As a former actor, Cogman developed a reputation as an actor's writer. “He gets the life of an actor,” Coster-Waldau explains. “He's extremely respectful when it comes to not getting in your way.” Adds Turner, “Bryan's lines are always the ones that affect me the most.”

When it came time to divvy up who would actually write each episode, Weiss and Benioff preferred season premieres, finales, and the big, splashy set pieces in between.

Cogman, on the other hand, preferred the performance episodes, full of scenes, he says, of “people talking in rooms.” He wrote the two key moments of the Jaime and Brienne love story, from the Season Three bathtub scene in “Kissed by Fire” to the emotional Season Eight climax “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” which sees the former Lannister antihero knighting the unlikely lady warrior. These quiet, shared moments stood out among all the dragon fire, shocking deaths, and big-budget battle spectacle.

“He has been a champion of my character Brienne and actually of me as an actor,” Christie says. “He had a real understanding of the trials the character had to overcome in order to achieve a sense of self-worth and how far we sometimes have to travel to move the narrative society has prescribed to us.”

“I can't imagine what it would have been like without Bryan,” Coster-Waldau says. “Thank God I don't have to.”

In Season Five Cogman volunteered to write what would become one of the show's most controversial episodes, in which the sadistic Ramsay Bolton rapes Sansa Stark, with Theon Greyjoy looking on in horror. Cogman, a father of three, had always taken a particular interest in protecting the show's younger performers on set. Turner compares him to a father figure, and Cogman felt he owed it to her to write the episode himself. “Why the hell did I choose ‘Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken’?” Cogman asks years later, then responding, “Good question.”

The scene was lifted from another character's story in the books and incorporated into a larger gothic nightmare plot of Sansa's being held prisoner in her childhood home at Winterfell—a practical, and carefully considered, way to give Sansa, who isn't in the fifth book at all, a bigger role in the story. Weiss and Benioff suggested closing the bedroom door on Sansa, Ramsay, and Theon rather than showing the act itself. “I am the one, God help me,” Cogman says, “who said, ‘If we do this are we being dismissive of what that real horror would be behind that door? Are we being disrespectful of the severity of that situation?’ But we, of course, never wanted to make Sophie go through a graphic scene.”

The result was still graphic enough to spark immediate online backlash and heated think pieces; then senator Claire McCaskill publicly declared she would no longer watch the show. HBO issued no official response to the controversy, and Weiss and Benioff have never commented publicly, even deleting a question about it in e-mailed responses for a recent Rolling Stone story.

Cogman stands by the scene, though he acknowledges it served as a pivotal point in a larger cultural discussion about sexual assault on-screen, which had also been used as a plot device on Mad Men and Breaking Bad, among others. “I will never presume to tell someone how they should feel about the scene itself. And believe me, I really tried to listen to all the criticism surrounding it and will continue to listen,” Cogman says. “I do take issue with the presumption of bad faith on our part—the idea that we treated Sophie or the character or the subject matter callously. I think if you watch the scene and see how it fits into the character's larger narrative arc over the subsequent seasons, you'll see that's not the case. At least I hope so.”

“It was a very difficult scene to write,” Cogman says. “It was a very difficult scene to shoot.”

“You see Bryan standing there, crying and wanting to hug you, he did that often,” Turner says. “He was the one that held me afterwards and we both cried together. He's apologizing because he wrote the scene. It was kind of beautiful. It felt like I was safe and not exploited in any way because I was with him. He's always been something of a protector, so it's really special to have him there.”

The controversies around Season Five, which saw many beloved characters used, abused, or shipped off to Dorne, did not dampen the show's popularity. That September Cogman and his fellow producers picked up the first of three Emmy Awards for Outstanding Drama Series, among a pile of others the show won.

As Game of Thrones headed toward its conclusion, it also moved away from the intimate, theater-like moments Cogman excelled at—partly a function of the large-scale conflict built into Martin's story, but also the TV landscape that Thrones transformed, bringing C.G.I.-heavy blockbuster spectacle to the small screen and daring other networks to keep up. HBO underwent a transformation as well. Once best-known as a boutique home for prestige TV, the premium cable channel was acquired last summer by AT&T, and an executive revealed plans to increase HBO's output of original content by 50 percent in 2019.

For a while, Cogman thought one of those new shows would be his to run. He had no ambition to do any kind of Thrones sequel until Martin asked him personally at a dinner with Weiss and Benioff in May 2017. There was a particular story he felt only Cogman could tell. (Many fans have guessed that it's the Targaryen-centric Dance of the Dragons tale, but for now Martin and Cogman are keeping it to themselves.) “The logical heir was Bryan,” Martin says. “He had been there since the very beginning.”

Despite himself, Cogman yielded to the excitement of the project. But the timing couldn't have been worse. Cogman had to pitch HBO his prequel idea while the final season of Game of Thrones was in production, and he was in a bake-off with four other writers, some of whom had also worked with Martin. Weiss and Benioff gave Cogman their blessing but were busy wrapping up their own time in Westeros, which meant any advice they gave was incidental: “Every now and then we'd discuss something or other while we were shivering in the writer's tent in Northern Ireland,” they wrote.

Collaborating with Martin on the prequel pitch, Cogman felt both a pressure and an arrogance that came from being the only contender in the race who had both worked on the original series and was handpicked by Martin. He spent the bulk of the final season's shoot under the impression that this wasn't truly his final season. “I wasn't really doing the kind of emotional, cathartic work one needs to do to say goodbye to everything,” he says.

Cogman found out he didn't get the job in spring 2018, and that Jane Goldman would, instead, be helming a series centered on the earliest days of Westeros. At the same time, his wife—who had put her own acting career on hold for most of a decade to support Cogman's work—was suffering from a herniated disk. Disappointed and suddenly having to move his family out of their home in Belfast, Cogman has no memory of his last day on the set of Game of Thrones: “I was exhausted and Mandy was hurting. We were packing up our lives of 10 years.”

“It hit me hard, not because I thought there was any great injustice. I'm sure Jane's show is going to be great,” Cogman says. “But all the insecurities come up: What, I can't even write Game of Thrones now?”

The story Martin so favored may live on at HBO, but Cogman is ready to try new things. Last September, Amazon Studios snapped him up and put him to work—the day after he picked up his third Emmy for Thrones—consulting on a hotly anticipated project he can't yet disclose. But, most exciting for Cogman, he will be developing a whole raft of shows that may have nothing whatsoever to do with dragons.

Martin still texts regularly with Cogman, and has offered occasional friendly input as Cogman searches for new books that Amazon might adapt. “I hope to work with him again someday if the various corporate entities that we work for allow it,” Cogman jokes. But Martin himself is locked into an overall deal with HBO, and Cogman, finally, is ready to move on. He attended the splashy Game of Thrones Season Eight premiere at Radio City Music Hall in April, but the following Monday he was back to work at Amazon, with a large-scale poster of a trio of his favorites—Arya, Sansa, and Brienne—watching over him.

“I was number two to the captain, and now I've gotta see if I can sit in that captain's chair,” Cogman says. “I'm looking forward to finding my people the way Dan and David found theirs.”