Meet the Wicklow welder turned Game of Thrones weapon master
Tommy Dunne won’t see a penny of the proceeds but he’s hoping the powers that be donate the money for the 2,000 pieces of memorabilia to charity
Meet the welder turned weapon master whose haul of Game of Thrones craftwork is set to fetch more than $1 million at auction.
Tommy Dunne won’t see a penny of the proceeds but he’s hoping the powers that be donate the money for the 2,000 pieces of memorabilia to charity.
The Westeros collection going under the hammer next week includes Jon Snow’s sword, Jaime Lannister’s golden hand and the Iron Throne.
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Some 900 lots also include Tyrion Lannister’s Hand of the King pin, and the black leather overcoat and dragon chain Daenerys Targaryen wore to her assassination.
Tommy, from Co Wicklow, fell into his profession almost by accident in the mid-1990s when Mel Gibson’s Braveheart was filmed in Ireland.
His CV since then lists a catalogue of blockbusters from Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan to Gladiator and Black Hawk Down.
Tommy told the Irish Sunday Mirror: “I was involved in the whole lot of it, the pilot that was never seen, the whole eight years of the shoot.”
He admits to having only read one of George R R Martin’s books on which the award-winning HBO series is based. But he said once he read the scripts for the TV fantasy series he was well and truly hooked.
He added: “I literally made tens of thousands of pieces. Even the simplest of arrows, there would be up to 10,000 arrows on the show at a time.
“That is even before you get into the world of swords, scabbards, belts, all the colour toning and the engraving.
“It was a huge project but for me it was a Godsend because they left you alone. I had a lot of experience before coming on to the job so I had carte blanche more or less.”
Tommy and his team crafted intricate swords with hand-moulded hilts, cross guards and pommels from scratch. They gave most of them names such as the Oathkeeper, Widow’s Wail, and Aria Stark’s Needle.
He explained how the painstaking process can take days and weeks, with two of his team spending two months making 5,000 arrows for just one battle scene.
He said: “The shaft of the arrow has to be pressure rated because when you let loose there is strain on the bow and it would shatter.
“Then the shafts have to be tapered down, stain them, put a notch on each one for the bow.
“The fletching, the feathers on the wood, you then need to create different tips whether it’s a bodkin, or barb, or point, or dragon glass tips.
“It’s tedious work. The sword depends on whether it’s intricate or basic. It’s probably one to two weeks per sword depending on the style of it.” The Heritage Auctions sale spans “almost every second” of the series, from its 2011 pilot to its final episode and series eight finale in 2019.
Iconic costumes worn by stars Emilia Clarke as Daenerys, Kit Harrington as Jon Snow and Sean Bean as Ned Stark have already seen bids of more than $20,000.
Tommy revealed the Iron Throne up for auction is not the original, which remains on display at the GoT experience in Banbridge, Co Down, but a replica made for a tour.
Reacting to the $1 million forecast for the auction, he laughed: “I wouldn’t get a penny from it, but I hope it’s spread out towards charities, it’s a drop in the ocean to what the budgets are for those big shows.”
He and his crew are working on Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee’s new show, with a Netflix war movie next in the pipeline. But he reminisces fondly about GoT and “having the best craic and the best fun with the actors and the crew”.
He revealed: “The cast were really lovely people, it’s hard to have a favourite.
“I dealt a lot with the likes of Kit [Harrington}, Maisie [Williams], Jerome [Flynn], he was very quiet, probably the quietest person on set. Jerome was actually very spiritual but a lovely fella, you wouldn’t see him in party mode.
“We would always have the craic with the Irish actors.... Liam Cunningham, he was great, Liam is just a lunatic anyway but also a lovely fella.”
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