Aidan Gillen (Littlefinger) shredded his Game of Thrones scripts to avoid leaks
By Corey Smith
Game of Thrones producers are notoriously paranoid when it comes to spoilers, employing layers of password protection, high-tech drone killers and exploding iPads to keep the show’s secrets safe. (Okay, we made the last one up, but the drone killers are real.) Back when he was on the show, Aiden Gillen (Littlefinger) took things a step further. He talked about his own spoiler prevention efforts to the Press Association:
"I’ve always been quite diligent about shredding scripts as soon as they’re done. Going way back to when I worked on The Wire. They had a shredding machine in the office, it was the first time I was ever conscious of that, it was before social media so it wasn’t such a big deal."
This is the exact opposite of what Littlefinger would do; he’d probably keep copies of every incriminating thing he could just in case he might be able to use it to cause trouble later.
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Anyway, it seems that HBO has been concerned about spoilers for a long time if Gillen was doing this back on The Wire, where he also played a shady power broker. “[T]hey were ahead of their time,” Gillen remembers. “They were saying, ‘when you’re finished with these scripts, come into the office and shred them because we don’t want people knowing what’s going to happen’.” Curse you, HBO.
Gillen doesn’t even tell members of his family what he learns from scripts, which makes him more careful than Kit Harington. And as we expected from a man so careful with spoilers, Gillen doesn’t know what’s coming in season 8, and even if he did, he wouldn’t blab:
"I don’t know how it’s going to finish but I am as excited as the rest of us. I honestly have no idea and friends who I would be in contact with who are still involved, I wouldn’t ask them and they wouldn’t tell me anyway. And I’d rather not know, but I’m looking forward to it."
As for his time on Thrones, Gillen says that people still greet him on the street as Littlefinger, despite roles in the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody and the History Channel series Project Blue Book. “That’s not gone away and it won’t…If it’s something as widely seen as that, it’ll stay in the ether for a while and eventually something else will come along and eventually no-one will know who you are, or care. It’s going to be great.”
Game of Thrones season 8 debuts April 14.
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h/t The Independent