UPDATED: Game of Thrones cast members pair off to do season 7 press

The premiere of Game of Thrones season 7 is just two months away, and cast members are finally doing press — and not incidental press, as when where Nikolaj Coster-Waldau talked about his movie career and got cajoled into discussing Game of Thrones. I mean actual press focused on GoT, with posters and everything.

Case in point: Carice van Houten (Melisandre) posted a video of herself and Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth) behind the scenes at some press event, with two chairs set up for a joint interview. Also her shoes.

Last year, HBO dispatched the cast members in a similar two-by-two fashion. Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton) and Michael McElhatton (Roose Bolton) did interviews together, Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) and Tom Wlaschiha (Jaqen H’ghar) did interviews together, and so on. Van Houten and Cunningham were also together for the season 6 press blitz. If we assume that HBO is pairing up actors whose characters have something to do with each other, this has some interesting implications for season 7. We haven’t heard much of what Melisandre will get up to in the coming episodes — will she and Davos reunite, and will it be unspeakably awkward?

UPDATE: Daria Bu has gotten a look at some of the other interview pairings. They’re pretty interesting:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BUJXpRNB8A2/

NOTE: The Instagram post was taken down. Luckily, the internet is forever.

So for interviews, we have:

• Sophie Turner by herself
• Pilou Asbæk (Euron Greyjoy) and Gemma Whelan (Yara Greyjoy)
• John Bradley (Samwell Tarly) and Rory McCann (the Hound)
• Isaac Hempstead Wright (Bran Stark) and Aidan Gillen (Littlefinger)
• Carice van Houten and Liam Cunningham, as seen above
• The first names of the final pair are partially covered, but I’m guessing it’s Jacob Anderson (Grey Worm) and Daniel Portman (Podrick Payne)

Some of those pairings, like the last one, don’t seem like they follow naturally. But keep in mind that while HBO tends to pair together actors whose characters are connected, it doesn’t have to be that way — for example, during the season 6 tour, Portman did press with Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy), even though their characters didn’t spend much time together.

It’s interesting that they’d pair Wright with Gillen, though…

In other celebrity news, Beyond the Joke reports that Gemma Whelan (Yara Greyjoy) will be joining actors like Alan Cumming and fellow Game of Thrones cast member Mark Gatiss (Iron Banker Tycho Nestoris) at the Old Vic Theatre for BBC Four’s Queers, a series of monologues celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalized homosexual acts between men. Each monologue will “explore some of the most poignant, funny, tragic and riotous moments of British gay history and the very personal rites-of-passage of British gay men through the last one hundred years.” Whelan, who we should point out is a comedian by trade, will perform a piece called A Perfect Gentleman.

The whole thing will go down in July, and be broadcast on the BBC thereafter. If you’d like tickets, look here.

Finally, Maisie Williams continues to film Departures, where she plays a terminally ill teenager with “an eccentric bucket list” alongside Ender’s Game’s Asa Butterfield. And that’s great. But really we just wanted an excuse to bring up Williams so we could post this fan art of what she might look like as the mutant Wolfsbane in Fox’s upcoming X-Men spinoff: The New Mutants.

This day in age, you’re no one in Hollywood unless you’ve played at least one superhero. Congratulations, Maisie Williams: you’ve arrived.

h/t Times Union