“Queer Eye” grooming expert Jonathan Van Ness has another area of expertise: “Game of Thrones.”
Van Ness is such a fan of the HBO drama that he started an after show with Funny or Die in 2013 called “Gay of Thrones,” in which he and a celebrity guest recap the latest episode while he does their hair.
We caught up with Van Ness to ask his expert opinion about how the show will end.
“My prediction was always that Bran was going to learn how to warg the dragons away,” Van Ness said, referring to Bran’s ability to take over and control the body of animals. In the books, several of the Stark children warg at some point with their direwolves (in addition to Bran, Arya and Jon do so).
But Van Ness said that after the Season 7 finale, he has a new theory: “I think he’s the Night King. I think he’s the Night King!”
“Their faces are eerily similar, and he can time travel. Cause I used to think that he was gonna warg the dragons, but maybe it’s not that he’s gonna warg them, he’s gonna f—ing–excuse my French–but he’s gonna control the zombie dragon. Which I just didn’t see that s— coming at all. Even with that blue dragon eye on the poster, I still didn’t see that coming. I had no idea it was gonna hurt so bad,” he said.
“Leave it to me to start cussing when we start talking about dragons,” he added.
In “Gay of Thrones,” the hairstyles Van Ness gives his guests often play right into the comedy of their recaps, but he said he does draw some inspiration from “Game of Thrones” IRL.
“So much of the hair on ‘Game of Thrones,’ especially like in King’s Landing and High Garden, a lot of it is so like ‘The Other Boleyn Girl.’ Which is great, but I’m kind of really into like… shag and really textured, like chin to collarbone length, like more medium length,” he said, adding that the hairstyles on men in the show strike him as more “on trend.”
“It’s like a little rougher and edgier and not so groomed and not so pampered. It’s like the opposite of being metro,” he said, adding that that look is also simply a symptom of the medieval world in which “Game of Thrones” takes place.
“Honey, no one has time for grooming in the Battle of the Bastards,” he said.
It’s no Battle of the Bastards, but shooting last season’s “Gay of Thrones” provided its own scheduling difficulties because he was also shooting “Queer Eye” for Netflix.
“I would shoot in Atlanta Monday through Friday, fly to LA, do hair, like, for twelve hours on Saturday and then go to Funny or Die and we’d watch ‘Game of Thrones’ on the East Coast feed, write it, shoot it, produce it, all of it by Sunday night. And then I would be on like the 5 a.m. flight out of LA back to Atlanta every Monday, and usually I’d go straight to set.”
You can watch “Queer Eye” on Netflix now and watch old episodes of “Gay of Thrones” on Funny or Die until “Game of Thrones” returns in 2019.