David Benioff

• 1. Introduction

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  David Benioff was born David Friedman on the 25th of September, 1970, the youngest of three children in a Jewish family in New York City. By the time he was forty, he had helped build one of the most watched television series in history. But the path from a Manhattan childhood to the showrunner's chair ran through San Francisco nightclubs, a Brooklyn high school wrestling mat, and the rain-soaked streets of Dublin.

  Who is the man behind a pen name borrowed from his mother's maiden name? How did a kid from Peter Cooper Village end up co-creating Game of Thrones? And what happens when the audience that made you famous turns against you? Those questions run through the story of David Benioff.

• 2. From Friedman to Benioff

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  Stephen Friedman, Benioff's father, was once the head of Goldman Sachs. Growing up with that name in Manhattan carried its own weight. When Benioff published his first novel in 2001, he chose to go by David Benioff to avoid confusion with other writers already using the name David Friedman. Benioff is his mother Barbara's maiden name, and that is the name he has written under ever since. His legal copyright filings from the 2010s onward list him as David Benioff Friedman.

  He grew up on 86th Street, attending the Collegiate School before heading to Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth he joined Phi Delta Alpha fraternity and earned membership in the Sphinx Senior Society. He graduated in 1992 with a degree in English Literature. After that, no publishing deal or Hollywood office was waiting. He became a club bouncer in San Francisco, then a high school English teacher at Poly Prep in Brooklyn for two years, also coaching the school's wrestling team.

• 3. Dublin and the Meeting That Changed Everything

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  In 1995, Benioff enrolled in a one-year program at Trinity College, Dublin, to study Irish literature. He wrote his thesis there on Samuel Beckett, but he left Dublin with something more lasting than academic credentials: he met D. B. Weiss, who would become his long-term creative collaborator.

  Deciding against an academic career, Benioff took a side job as a radio DJ in Moose, Wyoming, spending a year in the countryside largely as a writer's retreat. That detour ended when he read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, learned Chabon had attended the University of California, Irvine's creative writing program, and applied there himself. Benioff received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Irvine in 1999. His thesis for that degree became the manuscript for his first novel.

• 4. Novels and Early Screenplays

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  Benioff spent two years writing The 25th Hour, originally titled Fireman Down, completing it as his Irvine thesis. The book found its way to Tobey Maguire, who read a preliminary trade copy and pushed to turn it into a film. The result, 25th Hour (2002), starred Edward Norton and was directed by Spike Lee. In 2004 Benioff published a short story collection, When the Nines Roll Over (And Other Stories).

  Warner Bros. paid him $2.5 million to write the screenplay for the mythological epic Troy (2004). His next film, the psychological thriller Stay (2005), directed by Marc Forster and starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts, was followed by The Kite Runner (2007), adapted from the novel of the same name and again directed by Forster.

  In 2004, Fox hired Benioff to write X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). He drew on Barry Windsor-Smith's Weapon X story, Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's 1982 limited series, and the 2001 limited series Origin. Hugh Jackman collaborated on the script, which both men wanted to be more of a character piece. Benioff wrote with an R rating in mind, aiming for a story he described as darker and more brutal, but Fox later hired Skip Woods to revise the script, and the final tone shifted. His second novel, City of Thieves, was published in 2008.

• 5. Building Game of Thrones

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  George R. R. Martin's novel series A Song of Ice and Fire caught Benioff's attention in 2006, and he began working with Weiss on a television adaptation. HBO put the pilot, titled Winter Is Coming, into development in 2007 and greenlit the full series in 2010. Game of Thrones first aired in 2011 and ran through 2019. Benioff and Weiss served as executive producers, showrunners, and writers across the entire run.

  Before their Game of Thrones collaboration, Benioff and Weiss had written a script together for a horror film called The Headmaster, which was never produced. During the show's run they also directed three episodes, deciding between themselves by flipping a coin to determine who would receive the on-screen credit. Benioff was credited as director of Walk of Punishment, the third episode of season three; Weiss received credit for Two Swords, the first episode of season four. They co-directed the series finale, The Iron Throne.

• 6. The Backlash and What Came After

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  The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones ended in 2019. A petition posted on Change.org demanded that HBO hire what it called competent writers to remake the season, describing Benioff and Weiss as woefully incompetent writers. The petition gathered over 1.5 million signatures. Richard Roeper wrote in the Chicago Sun Times that the backlash was so intense he doubted he had ever seen the level of fan, and to a lesser degree critical, anger aimed at any show.

  A July 2017 announcement that Benioff and Weiss would develop a new HBO series called Confederate, set in an alternate history, met with public animosity before the show even went into production. As of the announcement of their Netflix deal in August 2019, Confederate was not moving forward.

  In February 2018, Disney had announced that Benioff and Weiss would write and produce a new series of Star Wars films. In early August 2019, Netflix signed them to an exclusive multi-year film and television deal worth $200 million. The Netflix commitment led Benioff and Weiss to exit their agreement with Disney and Lucasfilm for the Star Wars project.

• 7. Life Beyond Westeros

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  On the 30th of September, 2006, Benioff married actress Amanda Peet in a traditional Jewish ceremony in New York City. They have three children and divide their time between homes in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. He is a second cousin of Marc Benioff, the software entrepreneur and CEO of Salesforce.

  Their first Netflix project was directing the stand-up comedy special Leslie Jones: Time Machine, a pivot that surprised observers expecting another sprawling drama. Benioff, Weiss, and Alexander Woo then wrote and executive produced the Netflix series 3 Body Problem. In April 2014, Benioff and Weiss had announced a feature film project, Dirty White Boys, based on a novel by Stephen Hunter; 21st Century Fox approved pre-production, but public updates on the project stopped entirely, and Kasey Moore noted that no one known to be involved had offered any update in years.