One of the beheaded heads that appeared in Game of Thrones season 1 bears an uncanny likeness to former President George W. Bush, and for that the showrunners are sorry.

io9 uncovered this “easter egg,” reporting that the suspect head, pictured above, was noted in a season 1 DVD commentary as looking like the former president. In the 1×10 “Fire and Blood” commentary, producers Benioff and Weiss said:

The last head on the left is George Bush. 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 head we had around.

However, they have since apologised for making this comment, explaining:

We use a lot of prosthetic body parts on the show: heads, arms, etc. 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.

HBO also commented on the issue in a press release, saying:

We were deeply dismayed to see this and find it unacceptable, disrespectful and in very bad taste. 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.

Was it an uncalled for comment by the producers, or is HBO overreacting?