Sometimes, something instantly hits that geekout button. As soon as this picture of Mary Kate Wiles hit the internet, we started digging.
Turns out the new “School of Thrones” concept — what if the Lannisters, Starks, and all their Westerosey/frenemies and enemies alike attended high school — involves some of our very favorite people on the Internet, including Joey Richter (Ron in the StarKid Harry Potter musicals), Mary Kate Wiles (Lydia in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries) and Maxwell Glick (Collins in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries). And when a text chain results in THIS, we knew we had to find out more:
This upcoming Web series is like a super pileup of fandom and geek culture: Game of Thrones in a Breakfast Club/Sweet Valley High setting? Starring StarKids and LBDers? So we got in touch with series producer Whitney Milam, who has lots of geek cred on her own (past LeakyCon attendee, Hunger Games parodier extraordinaire), who gave us an inside scoop on the spoofy series. Which of the Westeros clan will find themselves part of battling cliques? A lot of them. Here’s a full cast list:
- Stannis Baratheon / Maxwell Glick
- Melisandre / Marisha Ray
- Loras Tyrell / Matthew Boehm
- Renly Baratheon / Brendan Bradley
- Theon Greyjoy / Joey Richter
- Robb Stark / Nick Palatas
- Margaery Tyrell / Whitney Milam
- Sansa Stark / Mary Kate Wiles
- Jon Snow / Austin Rogers
- Dani Targaryen / Ashly Burch
- Tyrion Lannister / Nic Novicki
- Joffrey Lannister / Luke Morgan
- The Hound / Matthew Mercer
- Littlefinger / Michael Coleman
- Varys / Sax Carr
- Balon Greyjoy / Ken Napzok
- Jaime Lannister / Joel Geist
- Tywin Lannister / Greg Niebel
That doesn’t mean those are all the characters. Whitney let us know that Cersei and others will be represented in the future. Filmed on the UCLA campus, the story has been translated to Westeros Valley High. All the main characters are here, but not exactly as you know them: Renly is a quarterback who is secretly sleeping with Margaery’s brother, for instance.
The series is being developed first as three eight-or-so minute episodes starting March 10 and leading to the March 31 premiere of the next season of the HBO smash series. Prom night is coming. And from the looks of it, some crazy stuff is going to happen.
Whitney gave us the low-down, so read on for more info on how it will all go down!
LeakyNews: So…tell us about this.
Whitney Milam: Essentially School of Thrones is the characters of Game of Thrones put in a modern high school comedically, which at first thoght you wouldn’t think is concept that is going to work at all but it totally does. It’s essentially Mean Girls meets The Breakfast Club with a little bit of Lizzie Bennet Diaries and not just because we have two cast members.
It is not formatted like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, however. It is not a video blog, it is an actual series shot like a TV show. It is going to be premiering as a three-part pilot, leading up to the March 31 premiere of the actual HBO show. They are three standalone episodes that make up one prologue to the series, and then once it’s established we will start putting out regular episodes a month or two later.
LN: Is there a set number or will you keep doing it as long as you can?
The concept leaves it open to indefinite number of episodes. We are shooting for less than 10 episodes a season. We kinda want to gauge reaction with these first three episodes. All the cast has expressed great interest in staying on the project and continuing the series. It’s just a great group of people. So talented and generous. We are very excited about it. The response from just releasing one promo pic of MK has been great. We are excited about the excitement.
LN: How did this come about?
It was originated and written by our executive producer, Zach Grafton, who has collaborated with our director, Matt Mercer, who is also executive producer, on There Will Be Brawl, which was a Web series with Machinima that was essentially a noir take on Super Smash Bros. To they are teaming up again for this and I am producing as well. Alex Creswick is the other producer. Zac is a huge Game of Thrones fan. To assuage the fears of anyone who is concerned that the people making this won’t respect or know the books, we have plenty of book-only jokes that only book readers will get. We were joking around imagining what the Game of Thrones characters might be like in the modern world and making fun of a CW or One Tree Hill-esque take on it and thought, wait a minute! That could totally work!
This was around the time The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was starting to blow up, and we both really really adored Mary Kate Wiles’ performance, and we thought, you know who would be an awesome Sansa? The girl who plays Lydia! So we approached her and she was enthusiastic and then I asked Joey Richter if he’d like to lend his comedic talents to Theon Greyjoy, who is a character everyone hates, and everyone loves Joey Richter, so it’s hilarious that he’s going to bring some Richter charm to an unliked character. There might be some Theon fangirls after this! He was the one to suggest he wear the speedo to prom, just with a sparkly vest over it. I am sure the fans will be all about it.
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