HBO, ‘Game of Thrones’ Creators Apologize for Using Severed George W. Bush Head

HBO and the creators of Game of Thrones have apologized for using a fake severed George W. Bush head as a prop in some of the show’s more gruesome scenes.

Creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss can be heard in a commentary track from the show’s first season DVDs explaining that they used the severed Bush head—though they did not intend to make a political statement.

“People may not have noticed this but … the last head on the left is George Bush,” the creators explained. “George Bush’s head appears in a couple of beheading scenes. It’s not a choice; it’s not a political statement. We just had to use whatever heads we had lying around.”

The decapitated head can be seen in an episode of the first season mounted on a spike, with a long, brown wig.

Many GOP party members are not pleased with the use of the head. According to ABC News, Craig Eaton, Brooklyn Republican Party chairman, called it “despicable.”

“As a country, Democrats, Republicans, we have to have respect for the office and the individuals. Once we lose that respect, the United States looks weak,” he said.

Both HBO and the show’s creators, however, rushed to apologize.

“We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste,” said HBO in a statement. “We made this clear to the executive producers of the series who apologized immediately for this inadvertent careless mistake. We are sorry this happened and will have it removed from any future DVD production.”

Meanwhile, last night, Benioff and Weiss also apologized in a joint statement, admitting that it was a bad idea to mention that the head was a replica of former President Bush.

“We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, et cetera,” they explained. “We can’t afford to have these all made from scratch, especially in scenes where we need a lot of them, so we rent them in bulk. After the scene was already shot, someone pointed out that one of the heads looked like George W. Bush. In the DVD commentary, we mentioned this, though we should not have. We meant no disrespect to the former President and apologize if anything we said or did suggested otherwise.”

This article was originally published on AllMediaNY.com