Iain Glen has played Jorah Mormont on Game of Thrones for eight years. He knows how it all ends, and while he didn’t spill the beans while speaking to Metro, he did tease a final season that will test what fans think they know about the show. “For viewers who have fallen in love with the show over the course of 70 plus hours, you get very strong affiliations and possessive as an audience,” he said. “I find that with things that transport me, you feel like it’s yours.”
"Without really thinking it through too clearly, you do have aspirations, you’ve got desires for what or may not happen. The bottom line is I’m sure we’ll not please everyone across the board, but when we gathered for reading the scripts right at the beginning, there was a huge sense the writers had done a fantastic job, and a fantastic job for the series as a whole. It’s the same concoction which has always worked, full of surprises and tension. For my money, it will satiate. My hunch is it will go down incredibly well because they’re brilliant scripts."
Well, that’s reassuring…we think. Parts of it also echoes comments made not long ago by Kit Harington (Jon Snow). “I think a TV series that’s spanned eight, nine years is an incredibly difficult thing to end,” Harington said. “I think not everyone’s going to be happy, you know, and you can’t please everyone.”
And what of Jorah Mormont specifically? Was Glen happy with where his character ended up? “Absolutely. I was very, very satisfied.”
Even if Jorah dies in the first scene of season 8, he’s accomplished something few other characters have: survived to appear in every season of the show. After being on Game of Thrones that long, letting go was weird for Glen, and came in stages:
"It filtered through at different times really. During the course of shooting, there was some really, really mega moments where you thought, “Fuck”, this is the last time that’s going to happen, that’s the last time I’ll be acting with her, and that’s the last scene with that director. So there were lots of stepping stones and weirdly, you’ve finished. There was moving farewells and then you get a call about a week later saying, “Sorry we just need to, can you come back and sit in front of the green screen?” There was a fair amount of that for a lot of us. That helped with the sensation of letting go I suppose. There’s goodbye and goodbye – it doesn’t feel like a cold cut off point and it’s still very much in our lives. One would be naïve to think it won’t be for some time by association if nothing else."
Those greenscreen shots may not be over, by the way. According, to Harington, that’s why he still hasn’t cut his Jon Snow hair.
But even if there are a few pickup shots left to do here and there, some things are over for good.“The one thing we won’t be doing anymore which I’ll miss profoundly is turning up on set and doing the work and reading the new scripts,” he said. “I have mixed feelings.”
Well, now we do too. Thanks, Glen.
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