Game of Thrones creators reveal reaction to coffee cup blunder in final season: 'I couldn't believe it’

David Benioff and Dan Weiss were baffled by error

The creators of Game of Thrones have revealed how they reacted after learning a rogue coffee cup had been left in a scene of the final season.

A sequence in episode four of the HBO drama's eighth and final season went viral after eagle-eyed viewers spotted that a takeaway coffee cup had been accidentally left in shot on a table in front of Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen.

"I couldn’t believe it,” said David Benioff in the book Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, which chronicles the creation of Game of Thrones.

“When we got the email about it the next day, I honestly thought someone was pranking us, because there had been things before where people were like, 'Oh, look at that plane in the background!' and somebody had Photoshopped it in.”

His co-creator Dan Weiss added: "I’d seen that shot one thousand times, and we’re always looking at their faces or how the shot sat with the shots on either side of it. I felt like we were the participants in a psychology experiment, like where you don’t see the gorillas running around in the background because you’re counting the basketballs.”

Game of Thrones coffee cup scene (HBO)

Weiss said the Game of Thrones blunder was far from the first time that modern-day objects had made it onto historical or fantasy film sets. 

“There’s an actor wearing a wristwatch in Spartacus,” he said. “But now people can rewind things and everybody is talking to each other in real time. So one person saw the coffee cup, rewound it, and then everybody did."

Last year, after initially receiving the blame for the coffee cup slip-up, Clarke claimed that the identity of the true culprit was her co-star Conleth Hill, who played Lord Varys.

Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon is out now.