It will come as no surprise that as we get closer to the arrival of Game of Thrones’ final season, the crew is going to do everything it can in all-out effort to keep a lid on leaks and anything that could potential spoil the surprises in store for the fantasy series’ eighth season coming next year. Even if that means using technology that kills drones that fly too close to the production sets.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly during a recent appearance at New York Comic-Con, Sansa Stark actress Sophie Turner let slip a secret about the way the crew is going to extremes to prevent the revealing of, ah, secrets.
“If a drone flies above sets, there’s a thing that can kill the drones, which is really cool,” she reportedly told the magazine. “It creates a field around it and the drones just drop. It’s very X-Men.” It’s also very — unusual, to say the least. Per TIME magazine, this kind of so-called “drone-killer” is an electronic device that’s typically the kind of thing police use in an emergency situation. Not, you know, for keeping fans of a hit TV show at bay.
It just goes to show you the intensity of the fandom around the series, which is such a cornerstone of pop culture that the race is on among HBO and competing subscription video platforms to now find the next GoT. Turner, meanwhile, told EW about shooting fake scenes and renaming the show The Tree of Life to try to fool snooping photographers.
It’s certainly been a big part of her life, playing the eldest of the Stark sisters for almost a decade. She revealed in her interview that Sansa “really comes into her own this season. It’s a whole new series for her. She’s been kind of lost. She doesn’t know who she wants to be or who wants to surround herself with. This season, she is very self-assured.”
On her final day on set, GoT executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss gave her a gift — a storyboard of their favorite Sansa scene. Turner read a long note they wrote on the back of it, and then “I bawled my eyes out. I was shaking and crying for hours.”
