Recently, Game of Thrones star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) was ordered by an arbitrator to pay $2 million to Jill Littman and Impression Entertainment. Littman represented the actor from around 2005 or 2006 when she was with a different agency, and he stayed with her when she started her own shop, Impression. The two parted ways in 2015, but not before Coster-Waldau (a native of Denmark), at Littman’s urging, applied for an 0-1 Visa in 2011 and again in 2014.
In 2017, Impression took Coster-Waldau to arbitration with a claim that he breached his 2011 and 2014 agreements, and because of that breach, he owed the agency unpaid commission. The actor disagreed with the amount Impression was claiming and fought it, but ultimately lost. You can read the entirety of arbitrator Henry Silberberg’s findings in this PDF from Deadline, but be careful, because a potentially huge SPOILER for Game of Thrones season 8 lurks within its pages. Continue at your own risk.
Still here? Good, let’s go ahead and skin this spoilery smokewagon. On page 21, there is an itemized list of Coster-Waldau’s Game of Thrones commissions. There, you’ll find that he is getting paid more than $1 million per episode for season 8 and that he only appears in four of the final seasons six episodes.
Obviously, we don’t know which episodes Coster-Waldau is in, in the final season, and we don’t know for sure that Jaime will even die, but if he does perish in the war against the Night King, then one might assume he does so around episode 3 or 4, which would line up with that 55-night filming spree that included a battle at Winterfell.
There is an odd caveat to all of this, however. At the bottom of page 22 (the last page in the arbitrator’s official findings) two episodes from season 8 are listed separately. You could argue that they were a last minute addendum before the ruling was revealed to each party. Perhaps “Sn. 8 — 4 episodes at $1,066,667/episode” was a mistake, and it was meant to read “6 episodes,” instead. You could also don your tinfoil hat and argue the episodes were added afterward, strictly for the sake of keeping a potentially huge season 8 spoiler under wraps…or at the very least for the sake of keeping the public guessing.
Regardless, this gives us something to obsess over until Game of Thrones returns for its eighth and final season in 2019.
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