Watch Two Excellent Behind-The-Scenes Clips From Game Of Thrones’ Vanity Fair Cover Shoot

Vanity Fair have released images from their Annie Leibovitz-shot photo spread and cover for Game Of Thrones, which will appear in the April issue that comes out later this week.

According to an article teaser, writer Jim Windolf spoke to members of the cast, novelist George R. R. Martin and the show’s creators. Co-creator David Benioff discusses the difficulties of working with actors who are growing faster than their characters (“Time is passing very slowly in the books and very fast in real life”), and he and Martin talk about the implications of creating a show that’s fast catching up to the books on which they were based: “If you know the ending,” Benioff says, “then you can lay the groundwork for it. And so we want to know how everything ends. We want to be able to set things up. So we just sat down with him and literally went through every character.”

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy: “I can give them the broad strokes of what I intend to write,” Martin says, “but the details aren’t there yet. I’m hopeful that I can not let them catch up with me.”

Below, the actors discuss what they think should happen. May include traces of HODOR.

Windolf also spoke to Peter Dinklage about his role as “halfman” Tyrion Lannister: “It just seemed like something I had never come across before, especially in the fantasy genre — which I still refuse to call this, even though we have dragons. It is just something that I was so eager to embrace, because it turned the dwarf stereotype in the fantasy genre on its head. And he’s a hero at the same time.

“Even in The Lord of the Rings, which I really loved—I loved those books as a child and I adore Peter Jackson’s movies—but there’s just that thing with the dwarf stuff,” he continues. “That’s complete fantasy. I had done The Chronicles of Narnia, with the long beard and all of that, because I definitely wanted to explore that and have an opinion of it from the inside, but I just feel like this character, Tyrion, was a complete human being. Shock!”

Watch the behind-the-scenes clip below, notable for the part where Peter Dinklage emerges from Jon Snow’s coat.