Game of Thrones extra’s dancing to her own beat in Belfast… how Bridie Mayfield put a heavy metal spin on ballet

The company is Stockholm-based, as most of her ballet dancers live there. The new production she is currently working on features the music of Japanese metal band, Gyze, and she plans to tour it around Scandinavia next year, where metal music is particularly popular.

But while Brutal Ballet has strong Swedish links, the mum-of-two decided she wanted to move to Northern Ireland instead to try her hand at securing extra work on cult series Game of Thrones.

Not only did she bag herself an appearance in three episodes of HBO’s epic fantasy show and several other high profile TV series, but her sons, Kurt Phipps (25) and Mali Phipps (23) also landed work as extras, with the younger of the two gaining notoriety as a CHIS (Covert Human Intelligence Source) in the recent series of Line of Duty.

Bridie said: “I’ve been doing ballet since the age of two and after seeing a similar ballet company in New York that danced to heavy metal music, I decided to set up Brutal Ballet.

“I love classical ballet and metal music and think the two can work well together. But I’m also a huge fan of Game of Thrones and it was a dream of mine to get some extra work on the series.

“I’ve been performing all my life so thought, ‘Why not as an extra on Game of Thrones?’ I have Irish citizenship, so I just threw caution to the wind one day and left Australia to relocate to Northern Ireland with my sons.”

Once here, Bridie and her sons signed up to The Extras Dept and the work began to come in. Bridie featured in many productions including Secret Life of Boys, Krypton and Line of Duty, in which she featured as a heroin addict in series three of the record-breaking police drama.

But Bridie had to wait until season eight to finally fulfil her ambition and get the chance to work on the screen adaptation of George RR Martin’s massively successful fantasy books.

“I appeared as a Wildling archer in three episodes,” she said. “I was on screen three times, which I was very happy about. I did some of the iconic scenes with Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) when he was leaving Castle Black.

“To watch myself back, shooting arrows off the Winterfell battlements, was so surreal.

Since then, Bridie has also appeared in Vikings saga The Northman, filmed in Northern Ireland and directed by Robert Eggers. The movie stars fellow Australian, Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgard, Anya Taylor-Joy, Bjork, Ethan Hawke and William Dafoe.

“I had no scenes with Nicole, but I did see her on set,” said Bridie.

While both her sons featured as extras in Game of Thrones, it was Mali’s appearance as the murdered CHIS (police informer) Alastair Oldroyd in series six of Line of Duty that brought him a lot of attention.

The unusual acronym confused viewers, with some mishearing it. Others came up with their own suggestions as to what it could mean. During one episode, CHIS even trended on Twitter.

“Yes, Mali got a lot of screen time for that part,” said Bridie. “We weren’t expecting that.

“Every Sunday night, when the show went out, he would be inundated with messages. It was a great experience for him too.

“In fact, Northern Ireland has been really good to us. We’re all very happy in Belfast.”

Bridie, who danced for George RR Martin at the TitanCon event in Belfast in 2019, plans to tour her Brutal Ballet full length show in 2022, with some preview shows in Stockholm later this year. She would love to bring it to Belfast but says Brexit is causing too many problems for that to be feasible.

One of the aims of her production is to show that ballet dancers don’t have to look a certain way.

“After years of working with metal ballet, I now know what works and what doesn't,” she said. “I am happy to say we'll be breaking the ballet mould for good with dancers who are amazing artistic performers, but don't necessarily meet the physical standards of height, weight or training time that ballet has traditionally required.”