The premiere date [1] for Game of Thrones [2]' highly anticipated eighth season [3] is still an eternity away, which means we have plenty of time to obsess over each and every little thing the cast and crew have let slip. Thanks to interviews with Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark), Kit Harington (Jon Snow), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), and more, we've gotten a pretty good idea about how the final season is shaping up. Spoiler alert: it's going to be a doozy.
Emilia Clarke
- On shooting her final scene [5]: "It f*cked me up, knowing that is going to be a lasting flavour in someone's mouth of what Daenerys is."
Peter Dinklage
- On the episode lengths [6]: "It's the final season, so it's pretty long. It's a long one, we like taking our time with this one."
- On coming to terms with the end of the show [7]: "It's bittersweet, it's always time to move on with everything. It's a sad part of our business, we get pockets of great people for a short amount of time and then you have to move on. It's always heartbreaking, especially when you've spent more than a couple months with people. But yeah, it's time. And story-wise, not just for all our lives. I think if they went any further they'd . . . it's the perfect timing to end it."
Sophie Turner
- On the premiere date [8]: "We started in October, so we're maybe like a tenth of the way through. [Laughs.] No, no we've got six or seven months left. Game of Thrones comes in 2019."
- On Sansa's life post-Littlefinger: "It's going to be tricky for her, because at the end of last season, she felt that she had everything set up. She had her family back together. They were in control of the North again. This season, there's a new threat, and all of a sudden she finds herself somewhat back in the deep end. And without Littlefinger, it's a test for her of whether she can get through it. It's a big challenge for her, without this master manipulator having her back. This season is more a passionate fight for her than a political, manipulative kind of fight."
- On the emotional series finale script [9]: "We had the read-through a while ago and at the end of it, we were all on our feet, applauding and crying. We had everyone there, everyone who's had any part in this. It was amazing . . . We closed the blinds and shut ourselves off from the rest of the world and had six hours in this room just reading it through and crying and laughing. We had our emotional bit and then we thought, 'Well now we've got eight months. We've still got a while to get through!'"
- On how it's essentially going to wreck us all [10]: "I can tell you that there's definitely a coming together of people. Everyone is coming together to fight the impending doom. There's a lot of tension between these little groups, battling for what they think is right. It's Game of Thrones, so it's going to be bloodier and more death and more emotionally torturous than all the years before."
Maisie Williams
- On how she feels about the show ending [11]: "I'm really excited for Game of Thrones to finish and there's going to be time for me to do whatever I want. It will be nice to pick roles that I want to do . . . I can show the world what sort of actress I want to be and shape my career a little bit."
Kit Harington
- On the boundary-pushing ending [12]: "They spent an increasing amount of money on less episodes, so it's gonna be much bigger in scale, the CGI. We're trying new things, experimenting with new camera techniques. I think we're trying to break boundaries and push past boundaries in these final two seasons."
- On the best way for the show to conclude: "The worst thing would be to end without really pushing and trying new things. Even if it's a failure, at least trying to go out with a bang."
John Bradley
- On where the characters are headed [13]: "These characters are so detailed and so rich, you can feel that you've got a pretty good handle on your character. You can predict how your character will react in any given circumstance, but when you place these characters in a new environment, it's always putting them under a microscope, and you constantly have to reexamine your character. Each of the characters this year is placed in a completely alien environment at some point in the season that they've never been placed in before. The thrill is seeing how they react to it and how they respond . . . This season, I think, more than any other is stretching these characters."
- On the pressure to deliver a perfect season [14]: "The stakes definitely feel ramped up. We know that we've got a real job to do. This has been a part of people's lives for so many years. This is our eighth season, and we are kind of feeling the pressure to get it right because we want to satisfy people. We want to give people a payoff that they're going to be happy with. We know how militantly passionate the fans of this show can be — in a good way — and we just kind of want to give them an ending that they deserve."
- On trusting showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss [15]: "The show has always been in the hands of two of the greatest helmsmen in TV. And nobody cares more about the show than those guys. Nobody feels that fan pressure more than they do. I think people are going to be delighted with the results."
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
- On the show's lasting impression [16]: "I don't think it'll ever be gone from my life. I'm going back to Belfast next week. I'm not 100 percent done, but I've shot the last scene with me . . . I'm gonna miss all those people, that's for sure."
- On what he thinks of the end: "They just couldn't have done a better job on ending our story. We've worked harder than ever before. We spent twice as much shooting these six episodes than we did on two full seasons before. No expense has been spared. We've gone all in."
Showrunner David Benioff
- On the episode count [17]: "From the beginning, we've wanted to tell a 70-hour movie. It will turn out to be a 73-hour movie, but it's stayed relatively the same of having the beginning, middle, and now we're coming to the end. It would have been really tough if we lost any core cast members along the way — I'm very happy we've kept everyone and we get to finish it the way we want to."
- On if the characters will live on in spinoffs: "The characters who maybe will survive, there's always going to be this temptation to keep doing it . . . to do the spinoff show or do the sequel show and everything. I think HBO might well do [another series] and I look forward to watching it and I think it would be great, but I think they should get new blood in."