Trainer confirms Ghost will be in Season 6, and more cast members board the hype train

Ghost, Jon Snow’s faithful direwolf, was last seen saving Samwell Tarly’s bacon when he was facing down some of his less-than-friendly Night’s Watch brothers in “The Gift,” the seventh episode of Game of Thrones Season 5. He was weirdly absent from the season finale, when his master was assassinated by a group of those less-than-friendly brothers, but he did make a brief appearance in the Season 6 trailer, nested near his master’s body.

There was some discussion over whether Ghost was dead or alive during that moment (the shot is very brief, so it’s hard to get a read on whether he’s moving), but the Calgary Herald can confirm that the direwolf will at least turn up in Season 6.

The paper sat down with Andrew Simpson, the man who raised and trained Quigly, the arctic wolf who plays Ghost on the show. While Simpson adhered to HBO’s code of silence (“Everybody calls me and everybody asks me: ‘What happened to Jon Snow? What happened to Ghost? What’s going on?’ I can’t tell you anything.”) he couldn’t deny that Quigly had done some acting for HBO lately. A handful of producers traveled all the way to Calgary to oversee 10 days’ worth of scenes shot in the area’s new film center (which technically isn’t yet open for business, but Game of Thrones tends to open doors). “For now…Ghost is still there,” Simpson said. And that’s all he had to say on the matter.

According to the Herald, the production also traveled to Calgary to shoot scenes for Season 5 in 2015, but it stayed longer this time. This could mean that, not only is Ghost alive, but we’ll be seeing more of him in Season 6. That can only be a good thing.

Elsewhere, more Game of Thrones cast members are boarding the Season 6 hype train. Dean-Charles Chapman (Tommen Baratheon) did his part on Twitter.

Thirty days until liftoff.

(For any animal lovers out there, the Calgary Herald article also gets into Simpson’s ambivalence about being asked to stage wolf attacks for films and TV shows. He’s gotta pay the bills, but as a man who owns over 16 Eurasian wolfs he trained from infancy, he wishes Hollywood portrayed the animals in a more positive light. Interesting stuff.)