Insider’s resident GoT expert, Kim Renfro, talks about what it was like to cover one of the biggest shows of all time and her new book, ‘The Unofficial Guide to Game of Thrones’
Caitlin Harper
When Entertainment Correspondent Kim Renfro took a temp admin job at Business Insider back in 2014, she never expected to become Insider’s resident Game of Thrones analyst. Just five years later, her book, “The Unofficial Guide to Game of Thrones,” was published by Simon & Schuster. When the book was released on October 8, 2019, we hosted a party at the Insider Inc. offices with trivia, a book signing, and a Q&A where I asked Kim about her journey into journalism, what she thought about the show’s final season, and what she’s working on next. Here’s what she had to say.
How did you start writing about Game of Thrones?
When I graduated college in January 2014, I was working at a bakery. I'd been there for about four and a half years and I needed a change. I started applying to some places and was hired as a temp office assistant at Business Insider. Because I was in the kitchens all the time and setting up everyone’s computers and things like that, I got to know everyone at the company. I was also very into Game of Thrones.
Back in 2011, a friend of a friend had said to me, “Oh, if you like Lord of the Rings, you’re going to love this new HBO show coming out,” so I watched the pilot of Game of Thrones and was immediately obsessed. When I found out that the show was based on a book series, I was much more into that — that’s the way I felt about Harry Potter and other fantasy series — so I read the books, but I did keep watching the show.
One day in the kitchen at work, I was talking with one of the editors about the latest episode, going off on a tangent about a fan theory and something that they had changed between the show and the book and he said, “Why do you know so much about this?” Well, I'd read all of the published books and I was on Reddit all the time reading fan theories, and when I told him that, he said, “Well if you ever feel like writing an article about the show, just let me know.”
That weekend I went home and drafted an entire Google doc of an article I wanted to pitch to him and when I sent it to him, he just threw it up on the site. I was expecting there to be like a whole process, but he said it was great, so it got posted and I sat there refreshing the page and watching the little flame count number go up and I thought, “Well, this is fun. I can just write about Game of Thrones and people will read it?”
From then on, I started covering the show on almost a weekly basis in my spare time. My big break was the season five finale. I had a feeling they were going to end the season on a cliffhanger with Jon Snow’s death because that's the cliffhanger from the last published book, so I prepared this 3000-word article about how he wasn't actually going to stay dead and all of the theories about how he was going to come back to life and it got something like 800,000 uniques, which was really great at that time.
I was getting addicted to writing about Game of Thrones for the site, so I asked my manager about possibly applying for a full-time reporter role. By August 2015, I was officially a full time culture reporter for what was then Tech Insider.
When it came to the book, were you approached to write it or did you pitch it?
Once I realized there was going to be a pretty long break between seasons 7 & 8, I starting thinking that someone must be writing a book about the show, or if they hadn't already started, they were going to. I decided that I wanted to be that person. I spoke with Jethro, my editor, and Nicholas Carlson, our editor in chief. I was still in the admin role when Nich published his book, so I’d seen it happen and I knew that it's a thing reporters can do here. So I asked him for some advice and he put me in touch with his editor who had an initial call with me. The editor wanted to hear my idea, my pitch, and when he liked it, he told me I needed an agent. I got in touch with an agency and my agent helped me refine my proposal and then it went out into the world and I signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster. That all happened between January and July of 2018.
Once you had the book deal, how did you balance your job at Insider AND writing the book?
I took 3 months of leave from my job at Insider, which really gave me a head start and helped me dig in to the project. I got about 60% of the manuscript done in that time. When I came back to work in January after my leave, it was full-time Insider work plus working on the book pretty much every night. When the show started up again, I had to both work on the book and report on the show. I think I published about 140 articles from the first promo that came out until the finale. So it was tough, really tough. I did not see my friends or have any sort of free time for about four months. I strongly recommend anyone considering a project like this to ask yourself if you really want to grind and grind like that. It was a long, hard project, but at the end, there was a book!
Let’s talk about the show! Are there things you learned about it that you didn't know before you started working on the book?
The most fun part of the process was the initial research phase, because I've only been writing professionally about the show since season five. For the first four seasons, I was really just watching as a fan. I’d watch the episode, maybe go on Reddit, but that was it. I learned a lot more and got more perspective on those early seasons by going back through the archives of YouTube videos that came out at the time, HBO articles, and old interviews that I hadn't read from when the show first came out. So that was the most fun for me — just doing what I do now with all of the newer episodes but with the older ones where I never had to pay attention so closely. So I think going back to the first half of the series and digging in, that’s where I learned the most.
If you look on our site, your first ever piece about Game of Thrones back in June 2015 was “One of the craziest 'Game of Thrones' fan theories might actually come true” about how Sandor and Gregor would fight to the death in a trial by combat for Cersei Lannister. Turns out, it was kind of true. What are some of the most interesting theories you’ve come across over the years that either came true or didn’t?
The theory that Bran was the Night King was definitely my most-hated one because it was based on all of the worst, illogical ideas. It didn’t make any sense. But even though I knew it obviously wasn’t true, I had such a deep-seated fear for about two years that it would happen. We hit a point where the show wasn’t quite following the same internal logic that they had in previous seasons, so even while I knew it didn’t make any sense within the world and within the facts that we know, I no longer trusted that Benioff and Weiss wouldn’t just say, “screw it,” and do it anyway. And so I was deeply relieved when the show ended and I could finally confirm that Bran was not the Night King.
So what do you think about how it all ended?
I feel mixed-positive overall. There are some really beautiful things in the final season, like the second episode, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.” When Jaime knighted Brienne … I basically cried happy tears for like a week over that. I also liked the final 15 minutes of the series finale. That whole Stark montage was very satisfying to me. I don’t think a lot of the major building blocks they used to get there worked, but it’s complicated. I don't think you can blame Benioff and Weiss for not sticking the landing of a story they thought they were going to have all the books for. They signed up to make this show thinking that there would be a very intricately detailed roadmap and the fact that they didn’t have that wasn’t their fault. It was a messy situation.
How did you work on the book while the show was still happening?
There were whole chapters where I just had placeholders because I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know Bran was going to become the king. A large part of the book is me outlining my favorite moments episode by episode, so I had all of those for seven seasons and as new episodes came out I would write highlights or things people might have missed, which became my signature article at Insider. So I had that ready.
The real challenge once it was over was writing a final chapter, trying to explain how Game of Thrones fits into all of pop culture. I had to figure out what that legacy was in about two weeks after the finale. The thing that threw me off the most was the battle of Winterfell episode, “The Long Night,” because I had a whole chapter that intricately laid out all of the research and theories about Jon Snow or Daenerys being this prophesied hero, and then I was like — Arya? She wasn’t in any of that chapter. I didn’t scrap that whole chapter, but it was the one that had to be the most heavily re-written.
Game of Thrones is over, at least as far as the show is concerned. What are you working on now?
Well, now we know we’re definitely getting a Game of Thrones spin-off, “House of the Dragon.” The best case scenario is that we get a Better Call Saul situation, like where Breaking Bad was great and everybody loved it but then Better Call Saul has a much smaller, niche audience and was critically praised. So I think if they do something very focused, that would work. I’m excited to get to write more about stories based on Martin’s work, and not this whole unfinished adaptation situation.
Aside from Game of Thrones, I write about so many other things! “Westworld,” “Stranger Things,” new shows like “The Mandalorian” on Disney Plus. There is literally too much TV right now, so I have plenty of roadmap ahead for more articles.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.