‘3 Body Problem’ Creators Played a Fake Script Prank on Eiza González Using ChatGPT
Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss have a history of playing pranks on actors that they particularly like and get along with.
During season one of Game of Thrones, they famously gave their handsome star Kit Harington a fake script where his character, Jon Snow, had his face burned off — and then told him he would spend the rest of the show looking like a ghoul.
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A few seasons later on Thrones, they told John Bradley that his character, Samwell Tarly, was finally getting a new costume, then sent him to a fitting where he was put into a foolish Henry the VIII-style outfit, complete with a large purple codpiece.
On their latest series, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, the duo struck again.
During a forthcoming The Hollywood Reporter chat about their Emmy-nominated series, Benioff and Weiss — along with fellow showrunner Alexander Woo — reveal a prank that was played on Eiza González, who portrayed nanotech trailblazer Auggie on the show.
“We gave Eiza a monologue — a three-page monologue mostly written by ChatGPT, that she was supposed to learn the next day,” Weiss reveals.
Benioff says, “We had ChatGPT do it, then we had to go through it and make it seem like it could potentially be a screenplay.”
The monologue was about a swimming pool. Since one page roughly equals one minute of screen time, a three-page monologue basically means a three-minute speech — which can feel like an eternity for an actor on camera giving a solo soliloquy. But the speech wasn’t merely long and largely nonsensical, there was also this:
“It did involve her learning like 50 or 60 digits of Pi,” Weiss adds.
“Or, I think it did?” Benioff asks. “I don’t know Pi well enough to know.”
The prank didn’t go too far, however. Shortly after sending González the script, executive producer and fellow Thrones veteran Bernadette Caulfield stepped in and assured the actress that it was just a joke. Production on the show’s first season was long and arduous, and Caulfield apparently wasn’t having it.
“Bernie was so tired, at that point she was like, ‘I don’t have the energy to pretend fake things are happening because there are 500 real things that are happening,'” Weiss says. “She told [González], ‘No you don’t have to learn a monologue about a swimming pool that lasts three pages.'”
So, fortunately for González, the scene was never filmed, and Benioff and Weiss say they never would have let it go that far anyway (as it would have meant putting an extra burden on the crew).
What’s particularly amusing about the prank is that Benioff and Weiss were also sort of parodying 3 Body Problem. A three-minute speech about a swimming pool written by AI that includes a famous (and endless) irrational number is bonkers, yes. But given that they were making a wildly audacious sci-fi series full of physics concepts, such a scene feels like the it-could-almost-happen Saturday Night Live version of their show.
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.
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