Joe Dempsie talks Game of Thrones season 8, Gendry’s mother

Where’s Gendry? That’s the question Game of Thrones fans were asking before season 7. The bastard son of King Robert Baratheon had been missing from the show ever since Davos Seaworth sent him off in a rowboat at the end of season 3. Well, he’s back now, and when he returned in season 7, he had to be prepared. Joe Dempsie (Gendry) talked to Men’s Health about his return, and what that entailed.

"When I went back, and on one of my first trips to Belfast, they said, “Alright, before you leave, we should take you over to the stunt department and show you the weapon you’re gonna be using this year.” Which is obviously a moment for any actor, and you get a little bit giddy and excited."

Dempsie is referring to the war hammer his character forged in King’s Landing. He was told to go home, buy a sledgehammer, and start practicing. As the stunt coordinator told him, the real thing was going to be a lot heavier. “So I did that. If anyone had seen me, they’d have thought that I was a certified psychopath, swinging the sledgehammer around in my back garden.”

"The first day of filming, when I was gonna be using it as part of a fight sequence, they hand me one made entirely of foam. I was like: “Hold on, I thought I was supposed to be getting bigger, so I could carry the hammer?” And they went, “Oh, yeah, we’re not gonna let you do a stunt scene with a real heavy hammer; you’re gonna kill a stuntman! Oh, by the way, you’ve got to make that look heavy.” So now I’m stronger than I’ve everbeen, trying to make a foam hammer look heavy."

To be fair, he totally pulled it off; that hammer looked very heavy.

Dempsie also talked about getting the scripts for season 8. “As those read-throughs approached (and usually you’ve at least read [the script] yourself before you get there), we still hadn’t received anything, and so everyone was waiting with bated breath,” he said.

"And then I remember the day that they dropped in all of our inboxes. There was this flurry of activity on WhatsApp, with people essentially rushing home to get started on reading these things, and saying to everybody else, “All right they’re here; I’m not gonna be able to start reading till tomorrow; NOBODY discuss anything that they read; don’t spoil it!” None of us wanted spoilers, even though we’re gonna sit down and read the flippin’ thing."

According to Dempsie, Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth) showed up to the final table read completely in the dark, not having read the final scripts at all beforehand so they could experience it in real time. “It was quite an emotional atmosphere. I remember John Bradley [Samwell Tarly] saying it’s strange, because it feels like the last day at school. But it’s not; it’s the first day at school—we’ve not even started filming!”

Dempsie praised showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss for how they ended the series. “[T]he fact that David and Dan did such a good job as well—that’s what made it bittersweet. Joy and, I guess, relief at the fact that they managed to bring this show to such a fantastic close. That’s a daunting prospect for anyone … I think that if the show ended in the way that a lot of people online predicted, then that might be a bit of an anticlimax.”

Speaking of “people online,” Dempsie says the cast doesn’t really pay attention to all the theories circulating around cyberspace, but he did want to know how his character’s story ends. “I was the most curious as to what we might find out about Gendry’s parentage,” he said. “Obviously, we know that he was the bastard of Robert Baratheon, but who might his mo[th]er have been?”

"There’s a line in season one, and it’s a first scene you ever see of Gendry, where he’s looking to Ned and he’s asked about his mother, and he says he doesn’t remember much about her at all, other than the fact that she had yellow hair and she would sing to him. It’s one of those things where you go, “Do they usually write lines that don’t mean anything, or lines that seem to have significance that [are] never addressed again?” I was kind of intrigued to see what that might mean, and what impact that might have on Gendry’s clout politically."

A mother with yellow hair? Gendry’s political clout? It almost sounds like Dempsie is toying with the fan theory that Cersei is Gendry’s mother, which would make Gendry a legitimate heir to the Iron Throne. We wouldn’t count on that coming to pass, but it would certainly throw a wrench into the works.

A wrench…or a hammer. Stepping away from season 8 for a moment, Dempsie was asked to describe Gendry’s look. “It’s porno blacksmith,” he said. “Lots of leather. Lots of baby oil. He’s gone for the crew cut now. He’s variations on that theme. It’s quite rare that you get to do a scene that he’s not completely grubby and sweaty in it, which is understandable given his vocation.”

Dempsie was also asked to recall his favorite moment from Game of Thrones. “A lot of the stuff that we’ve done in season 8—the scale of it has been unbelievable,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder, ‘I don’t know if I’ll ever work on something of this level again.'”

"And also, just the fact that you can turn to one of your colleagues in between takes, look at each other and say, without hyperbole or being ironic: “TV history, man; we’re in it, we’re making it.”"

He also has fond memories of the “ill-advised” trip to capture a White Walker in season 7. “We were in Iceland for 3-4 weeks,” he said. “It was in January, so the nights were long, the days were short. We were in the wilderness, filming on glaciers and mountains. That group of actors all had their little eccentricities and idiosyncrasies. As a group experience, it was pretty special. Everywhere you looked it looked like a postcard. But we were making TV.”

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We’ll be able to see how Gendry’s story ends when Game of Thrones season 8 premieres on April 14.

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