On Wednesday night, HBO took over the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco for a screening of the Season 3 Premiere of Game of Thrones, giving about 600 folks a sneak peek of what’s in store for the new season. Somehow, Anthony Ha* and I were lucky enough to interview several of the cast members, and since we work for a tech blog, we weren’t that interested in learning what they were most excited about when talking about the new season. Instead, we wanted to find out what each cast member’s smartphone of choice is.
Well, you’ll be happy to learn that five out of the six Game of Thrones cast members we surveyed said they had an iPhone instead of an Android device. The lone Android holdout was Rose Leslie, perhaps because her character Ygritte is one of the savage wildlings who live above the North Wall.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays famed “Kingslayer” Jaime Lannister, however, made sure to let us know that the device he owns isn’t necessarily representative of some dogmatic preference for one or the other. “You ask me what I have and that’s an iPhone, but I’m not voting for [it],” he said.
The cast members mostly seemed to use their smartphone apps for playing games to pass the time and communicating with friends. Leslie said her favorite app was Fruit Ninja, while Maisie Williams, who plays the young Arya Stark, preferred Cut The Rope.
Natalie Dormer (Margaery Tyrell) uses WhatsApp to stay in contact with all of her friends while traveling on press tours, and Kit Harrington (Jon Snow) highly endorsed Hugmail — an app for brightening a person’s day by sending them a postcard.
Coster-Waldau admitted to using social workout app Endomondo, as well as purchasing train tickets via mobile app while at home in Denmark.
Meanwhile, Michelle Fairley, who plays Catelyn Stark, said, “I don’t do the Internet at all.” That said, she’s a big fan of mobile shopping: Her favorite app is Net-A-Porter, which she uses to find and purchase fashionable items to send straight to her home.
While the cast was made up mostly of iPhone users, they were joined on the red carpet by two tech founders who preferred Android devices. Both Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger stood by the Google operating system, although Krieger just switched allegiances about a month ago. (Unsurprisingly, Krieger’s favorite app is Instagram, although he said he was happy the Jawbone Up now has an Android app.)
While they all had smartphones, the cast admitted to not being quite as tech savvy as much of the San Francisco audience attending the premiere. Harrington, for instance, told us he prefers not to participate in social media.
“I don’t tweet, because I don’t trust myself to tweet,” he told us. “If I wasn’t maybe an actor and people wouldn’t follow me, then I wouldn’t mind. But I don’t trust myself to tweet because I don’t know what I’d say.” (It’s ok, Kit. I don’t trust myself to tweet either.)
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* Anthony has asked me to apologize for his massive head being in every shot. Our cameraman John Murillo had a small space to work with, but also, Anthony’s head really is that big.