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‘3 Body Problem’ Creators Prank Eiza González with Fake Script
Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have a knack for pranking actors they particularly like or get along well with.
During the first season of Game of Thrones, they famously tricked star Kit Harington with a fake script where his character, Jon Snow, ends up with a disfigured face, leading him to believe he’d spend the rest of the series looking like a ghoul.
A few seasons into Thrones, they played another prank on John Bradley, who plays Samwell Tarly. They told him he was getting a new costume and sent him to a fitting that ended up being a Henry VIII-style outfit with a ridiculous purple codpiece.
Their latest series, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, was no exception to their playful antics.
In an upcoming interview with The Hollywood Reporter about their Emmy-nominated series, Benioff and Weiss — joined by fellow showrunner Alexander Woo — revealed a prank they pulled on Eiza González, who played nanotech trailblazer Auggie in the series.
“We gave Eiza a monologue — a three-page monologue mostly written by ChatGPT that she was supposed to learn by the next day,” Weiss confessed.
Benioff added, “We had ChatGPT do it, then we edited it to make it seem like it could actually be part of the screenplay.”
The monologue was about a swimming pool. Given that one page roughly equals one minute of screen time, a three-page monologue essentially means a three-minute speech — which can feel like forever for an actor performing a solo piece on camera. But the speech wasn’t just long and somewhat nonsensical; it also included this twist:
“It involved her learning like 50 or 60 digits of Pi,” Weiss added.
“Or, I think it did?” Benioff pondered. “I don’t know Pi well enough to know.”
However, the prank didn’t last long. Shortly after sending González the script, executive producer and Thrones veteran Bernadette Caulfield stepped in and assured the actress it was just a joke. The production on the series’ first season was lengthy and challenging, and Caulfield was clearly not amused.
“Bernie was so tired. She said, ‘I don’t have the energy to pretend fake things are happening because there are 500 real things that are happening,’” Weiss recalled. “She told [González], ‘No, you don’t have to learn a monologue about a swimming pool that lasts three pages.’”
So, in the end, González was spared from having to perform the absurd scene. Benioff and Weiss noted they wouldn’t have let it escalate that far anyway, as it would have placed an extra burden on the crew.
What makes the prank even more amusing is that Benioff and Weiss were somewhat parodying their show 3 Body Problem. A three-minute speech about a swimming pool written by AI that includes an extensive irrational number is definitely bizarre. But given the show’s ambitious sci-fi nature filled with complex physics concepts, the scene almost feels like a satirical Saturday Night Live version of their own series.
Season one of 3 Body Problem is currently streaming on Netflix, and the full Benioff, Weiss, and Woo interview will be published on THR.com later this week.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
