🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

In Vikings Valhalla Season 2, Harald Sigurdsson (Leo Suter), Leif Erikson (Sam Corlett) and their crew make the cold and grueling trek to Constantinople. You’ll never see a Viking without their boat, but what happens when the journey involves crossing over ice? The solution: build a sled big enough to transport the entire ship. Creating this wintry scene took a lot of movie magic to transform County Wicklow, Ireland into a frozen tundra. Here are five takeaways from this behind-the-scenes featurette on how the Vikings: Valhalla cast and crew filmed that intense ice river sequence. 

1. Building a sled for the boat.

A boat on a sled — what a concept! As supervising art director Jon Beer explains, the 3.5-ton boat required a custom-built trailer, made to look like a sled, that was capable of holding up its weight. Crew members used a crane to lift the massive boat onto the trailer, which was then pulled by eight horses. 

2. Transforming a quarry into an ice river.

In the scene, the ice river is lined with soaring pine trees covered in snow. Thanks to the visual effects team, you’d never guess that this set was actually built in a quarry surrounded by lush greenery. For the frozen river, the production crew used 3,500 square meters of concrete covered in fake snow and ice chunks. 

3. Filming during an Irish summer.

The Vikings were built to sustain all kinds of weather, including filming during the summer. The video shows the Vikings Valhalla cast members cooling off with fans in between takes while bundled up in their thick fur coats and Viking gear. 

4. Getting the boat stuck in ice.

Not all journeys are smooth-sailing. In this case, the Vikings hit a massive bump in the road. “One of the fairly tricky parts of the script is that this boat gets stuck in a hole in the ice,” Beer explains. To create the life-threatening setback, production crew members cut out a massive hole in the ground, filled it with water and meticulously engineered the ship to tip into the ice at just the right angle. 

5. Creating built-in tanks. 

The challenges didn’t stop there. The next step for the production crew was installing built-in tanks into the ground to allow characters to fall through the ice. Just as they did for the ship, multiple holes were cut out and filled with murky ice water. Thanks to the help of visual effects, viewers see an intense sequence of rippling and churning ice breaking through the frozen river. Luckily, no cast members were actually crushed or harmed from the ice stampede. If anything, some real ice would’ve been appreciated to help them beat the heat.

The Cast of Vikings: Valhalla Take You on the Journey to Season 2This is what true Vikings are made of!