So it’s going to be like this, apparently. The final season of Game of Thrones doesn’t get here until 2019, but the cast is starting to excel at giving us excruciatingly good teases about what’s in store for the last go-round of HBO’s landmark series.
In an interview with The Hindustan Times a few days ago, for example, actress Nathalie Emmanuel says the final season is going to bring everything to a close in a way that’s “incredibly satisfying for people.” But she also says it will be “heartbreaking.” Emmanuel, who plays Daenerys Targaryen confidant Missandei, adds even more cryptically that she feels “like people will have their mind blown when they watch the final one.”
Production has actually already wrapped up, and it reportedly took longer to shoot the season than of the seven that came before. Everyone is naturally being tight-lipped about what we can expect, which should go without saying. But Emmanuel’s is actually the latest in a string of teases from cast members who’ve parceled out little hints about what’s to come — and how we’ll all feel by the end of the show that so successfully and bloodily brought George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels to life.
The Independent has a good roundup here of some of those hints that have come out thus far from people close to the series. Here are a few:
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the actor who plays Ser Jaime Lannister, told Variety that “no expense has been spared” on this final season. Before going on to tell us that, what else would you expect, more deaths that crush us are probably in the cards. “Even the most extreme things have been driven by story. At this point in the show… you’re reaping the rewards of the work that’s been put into all these characters. As an audience member, you’re kind of invested into every single one of these people, which is… I shouldn’t talk about the ending here.”
From Joe Dempsie, who plays Gendry Baratheon, we get this tease he shared with Metro — that this season concludes with “an ending I don’t think many people will be expecting and I think, on reflection, people will really, really enjoy.”
Sansa Stark actress Sophie Turner told Just Jared Season 8 will be “bloodier than ever.” And we’ll end things with these tantalizing hints from Daenerys actress Emilia Clarke. Hoo-boy.
“It f—– me up,” she’s already told Vanity Fair. “Knowing that is going to be a lasting flavour in someone’s mouth of what Daenerys is…”
When you see it, she continues, “you’ll know what I mean.” The magazine notes Emilia got unusually candid for a cast member about what’s in the cards, which “suggests Daenerys’ story may not exactly end heroically and with fanfare –- which is probably for the best given her character has always been deeply flawed, an egalitarian one minute a despot the next.”
