Director of Infamous Game of Thrones Episode With Coffee Cup Weighs in on Fan Responses

The final season of Game of Thrones came with incredibly high expectations, likely leading to the series enlisting director David Nutter to helm half of the season's episodes. Nutter had previously proven his skills not only with a variety of TV series, but also delivered some of Game of Thrones' most memorable episodes. The director's entries into the final season were received positively, yet one of his episodes featured a cameo from a contemporary coffee cup, which drew most of the social media's attention over anything else in the episode. Nutter claims that the focus comes from audiences who wanted to find any flaw they could with a series that normally has an exceptional execution.

"The first thing I said was they had changed an angle of the take, so I wasn't there when they changed it, so I didn't blame myself, which was good," Nutter revealed during a roundtable directors' discussion for The Hollywood Reporter. "And then I looked to see if it was maybe mine — it wasn't. But I think the show is so damn perfect in many respects that people love to find the blemishes, it's just a little non sequitur that doesn't really amount to anything at all."

Nutter is no stranger to being passionate reactions to an episode he has directed, as he helmed Season Three's "The Rains of Castemere," known for its infamous "Red Wedding." Thanks to that traumatic episode, Nutter had grown accustomed to people expressing their reactions to the series on social media.

"When I did 'The Red Wedding,' that was an episode that once I finished it and then I got a chance to watch, there was about a 15-, 20-minute tape that people had compiled, their reactions to the end of the episode," the director detailed. "And it's quite something to see that what I was doing was affecting people in that respect, people jumping up and down on their couches, screaming and yelling and crying. When you get to things like the coffee cup on the table or something, that's just … she ordered herbal tea and she got coffee, so that was a mistake."

The erroneous coffee cup will be nothing more than a memory, as HBO has since digitally removed it from the episode on all platforms.

All seasons of Game of Thrones are now available on HBO Go and on Digital HD.

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