Whatever the motivation, the fact the production used a severed head that looks like former President George W. Bush has prompted HBO and Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to issue apologizes. Benioff and Weiss actually pointed out the head on the DVD commentary of season one while discussing the scene in which King Joffrey forces Sansa Stark to look at her father’s severed head on a spike. The severed head that resembles Bush can barely be seen and is covered with a long black wig.
The formal apologies:
HBO: “We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.”
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss: “We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush.
In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.”
