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Game of Thrones producer David Benioff has been making the rounds explaining why the makers of the hit HBO show decided to make some drastic changes from the books by George R. R. Martin. He specifically discussed what is happening with the character Sansa Stark with publications like Entertainment Weekly.
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Born David Friedman in New York, the “Game of Thrones” co-creator chose to take his mother’s maiden name professionally when he began his career as a writer. This was because there were other writers also named David Friedman.
In the show’s most recent episode, fans of the books were perturbed to see Sansa Stark agreeing to marry the hated Ramsay Bolton. In the novels Bolton marries a girl who pretends to be Sansa’s younger sister Arya.
Benioff explained his reasoning behind the changes saying, “Sansa is a character we care about almost more than any other, and the Stark sisters have from the very beginning been two characters who have fascinated us the most.
“We got very lucky in casting because it’s so hard to cast good kids. Even if they come in and do a great audition, it’s so hard to know if they’re going to quite literally grow into the parts. With Sansa and Arya in particular, their storylines have become quite dark. It was such a gamble and the fact that they’ve both become such great wonderful actresses is a bit of a miracle.”
This will probably not be enough to placate Game of Thrones fans who feel as strongly about the source material as Jews do about the Talmud.
Benioff added, “We really wanted Sansa to play a major part this season. If we were going to stay absolutely faithful to the book, it was going to be very hard to do that. There was as subplot we loved from the books, but it used a character that’s not in the show.”
