Sophie Turner just put one of the world’s biggest mysteries to rest: the coffee cup gaffe of Game of Thrones season eight.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Let’s back up for a second. If you watched this season of GoT, then you most likely remember how snoozy episode four was. To be fair, it had a lot to live up to, seeing as how it directly followed Arya Stark killing the Night King. All this dead air, though, probably explains why fans chose not to focus on the plot and instead on a rogue coffee cup that somehow made it into one of the scenes. Here it is to jog your memory:
And a few Twitter reactions to remind you of the sheer pandemonium it caused:
So how the hell did this happen? Game of Thrones is a detailed, big-budget production, so the fact such an obvious mistake made it into a final episode cut is head-scratching. At first Turner blamed the incident on Emilia Clarke, joking to Jimmy Fallon, “Look who it’s placed in front of. Emilia Clarke. She’s the culprit.”
But now Turner’s changing her tune. She now posits that Kit Harington is the one responsible for coffee cup-gate. “I hear this every day of my life. This coffee cup thing,” Turner told Conan O’Brien in a interview on Conan Thursday night, June 6. “It’s good to know the coffee cup got more press than the final season altogether. The coffee cup was where Kit’s chair was. At first I blamed it on Emilia, but I don’t think Emilia would do that. Kit is lazy, and I think he would’ve done that. It was in front of Kit’s chair and then, obviously, he moved so this picture was taken and it looked like it was in my seat. But I wasn’t there, either. It was Kit. It was 100 percent Kit.”
Adds defender Kelley O’Hara, 30, who’s making her third World Cup appearance this summer: “At the end of the day, we’re all playing soccer because we love it and we’re good at it and it’s something that we’re passionate about. But I do think that it’s important to understand that we have a responsibility. We are in a place where we can impact the game and impact society—this team has always done a great job of balancing those two things.”
The balance isn’t always easy. In March 2016, five of the team’s most recognizable players—Hope Solo, Carli Lloyd, Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Megan Rapinoe—filed an official complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission alleging that the U.S. Soccer Federation paid women “substantially less” than men in the sport. Fresh off their World Cup win, they found support: Two months later the U.S. Senate came together to unanimously pass a bipartisan resolution supporting the women and asking the Federation to grant the players equal pay. The resolution was nonbinding, but the players got one step closer to victory regardless. In Feb 2019 the EEOC sent a “right to sue” letter to the team, so this March—on International Women’s Day—that’s exactly what they did. The entire team sued the U.S. Soccer Federation for gender discrimination.
It’s easy to see why they’re frustrated. The women’s team handily outperforms the men’s: They’re ranked significantly higher, hold more World Cup titles and Olympic medals (four golds), draw bigger TV audiences, and since their 2015 win, have generated more money for U.S. Soccer. (Meanwhile the U.S. men’s team failed to even qualify for the 2018 World Cup.) Still, they’re paid significantly less—some players make just 38 percent of what their male counterparts make, according to the lawsuit. “Right now the structure is set up so that our counterparts on the men’s national team have the opportunity to make so much more money,” says Press. When the men’s team qualified for the 1990 World Cup, each player got a $10,000 bonus; when the women’s team earned the same honor a year later, they reportedly got a T-shirt.
Things haven’t improved much. For the last Women’s World Cup in 2015, FIFA, the international governing body of the sport, offered the winning team $2 million in prize money. The winning men’s team had been paid $35 million—17.5 times more—in the men’s World Cup a year earlier. (The Federation maintains that it hasn’t discriminated against the women’s team, and that the men and women players have fundamentally different jobs, team organizations, and compensation setups.)
Some critics point out the USWNT is among the most well-funded women’s sports programs in the world. But being the highest paid woman at your company who’s still making less than men at your level isn’t equality. “We’re very grateful for what we have, but we’re definitely demanding what we deserve,” says forward Alex Morgan, 29. “My hope is that the next generation will be able to have [total equality]—it will just be a given.” (To help make it a reality, Secret recruited Morgan to launch the brand’s Equal Pay for All campaign, pledging $100,000 to Girls Leading Girls.)
Pissing off the powers that be when they are in some of the most crucial months of their careers is risky for these players—but they aren’t backing down. “It’s part of our job to do this,” says Lloyd. “It’s not something that is comfortable, but in order to get what you deserve, you have to be a little uncomfortable.”
It appears that the Game of Thrones cast is turning against each other as Coffee Cup-gate’s culprit continues to remain a mystery. Fans pointed fingers first at Sophie Turner, a.k.a. Sansa Stark, who had been captured on camera holding a similar cup in a behind-the-scenes pic, but she denied that she left it on the table for the cameras to (accidentally) include in a scene. Now, in a twist worthy of, well, a Game of Thrones episode, Turner’s pointing her finger at Emilia Clarke, a.k.a. Daenerys Targaryen (all in good fun, of course).
Turner sat down with Jimmy Fallon to discuss Coffee Cup-gate on Friday and made her case for Clarke.
“Let’s clear this up,” the actress told Fallon. “That’s in a different scene, and also, we all have the same cups for all of our water and tea and everything, so I’m gonna just go with, I mean look who it’s placed in front of. Emilia Clarke. She’s the culprit.”
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Clarke, on her part, got ahead of the story last week, denying that it was hers after Liam Cunningham (the Onion Knight) went on Conan and told the host it was her cup. “What a bastard!” Clarke told the L.A. Times (“laughing,” it should be noted). “I don’t even drink Starbucks. I have no idea whose it was. Liam’s a cheeky one. The funny thing is in Belfast, there is no craft coffee selling Starbucks. Unless we’ve got the Americans in, some hotshot producer, and then we’ll have Starbucks lying around.”
We might never know the answer.
(P.S. If you didn’t catch the cup while streaming the episode and have no idea what this is all about, it’s because the cup was digitally removed from VOD episodes.)
Original Story
Caution: Some light Game of Thrones spoilers ahead.
After last week’s episode of Game of Thrones, people were buzzing about how Arya Stark was the one to kill the Night King. But this week’s viral topic is a little…erm, lighter. It has nothing to do with the plot—though that was action-packed—and instead focuses on an apparent production blooper.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Well, let me take you to the exact moment in question. It happened while Tormund was talking to Daenerys, who was sitting at a table and not looking happy in the slightest. If you look closely, you’ll see something interesting on the table in front of Daenerys. Something modern. Something you might drink a few times a week, at least. It’s a Starbucks cup, and fans are completely losing their minds.
This eagle-eyed fan captured video of the moment and provided some hilarious commentary. Check it out for yourself, below:
I truly have no idea how a Starbucks cup ended up in the final cut of a Game of Thrones episode. Did the beverage empire somehow break the time-space continuum? Does Daenerys have time-traveling powers we don’t know about? Is the lighting on the show just so bad that this was missed? Either way, I’m so thankful this mistake happened—if anything for the Twitter reactions. Check out just a few of them, below.
Now I’m sitting here thinking about what Starbucks orders the Game of Thrones characters would have. Arya Stark is such a badass that she’d probably drink just plain coffee with no sugar. Sansa Stark strikes me as a green tea kind of gal. All the dragons on the show would 100 percent order Caramel Frappuccinos. Cersei would walk into a Starbucks and walk out the second she realizes wine isn’t on the menu (which, understandable). Jon Snow, meanwhile, doesn’t deserve any Starbucks at all.
