As successful as season 7 of Game of Thrones was financially and creatively, it was also one of the most tumultuous seasons of television in HBO’s history. Data was stolen from private servers, hackers attempted to ransom that data for millions of dollars and full episodes from the season leaked online days before they aired.
As such, you likely won’t be surprised to learn that HBO is on high alert as production begins on the eighth and final season of the show. In an interview on a Scandinavian talk show, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) revealed that security has gotten so tight that actors are no longer receiving scripts. Instead, they have earpieces in and are fed their lines. If there are no scripts, there’s nothing to steal and nothing to leak.
Coster-Waldau explained that for the first season or two, the cast received hard copies of the script in advance, as an actor would for any given TV show, movie or play. As the show became more popular, HBO switched to digital files, so that at the very least a physical copy of the script wouldn’t be left sitting in a coffee shop or something. But even that wasn’t enough, as the crew changed the delivery method once again to verified email in recent years.
Of course, it’s possible that the actor was either joking or just flat out lying in order to throw hackers off the scent (or just for a laugh). But considering the fact that HBO is reportedly considering filming multiple endings just to keep the real ending a secret, there’s no telling how far the network will go to protect its top property.
