Naomi Watts on the pressure of following up Game of Thrones: “I’m trying not to think about it”

Game of Thrones is over, with last Sunday’s Emmy ceremony giving fans, cast and crew alike a measure of closure. The show won the most coveted award of the night: Outstanding Drama Series, which is another statue HBO can cram into its record-breaking trophy case.

The enormous success of Game of Thrones has put a lot of pressure on HBO to produce a worthy follow-up. At the moment, our eyes are trained on Blood Moon, a prequel show set thousands of years before the main series, starring Naomi Watts as “a charismatic socialite hiding a dark secret.”

So how does the actress feel about taking up the mantle for the biggest show of our generation? “I’m trying not to think about it,” she told ET Online on the red carpet at the Emmys. “Yeah, but it is evident how well done it is.”

"At the end there, watching them all up on stage having gone through such a long period of time and they’re so well-connected and bonded, and you know they’ve all done such an incredible job."

Watts is talking about the sweet — albeit clearly unrehearsed — moment during the Emmy ceremony where all the cast members nominated for awards got on stage for a fond look back at the show:

Watts is friendly with several of the cast members already, and clearly has the stamp of approval from a couple:

Watts didn’t watch Game of Thrones regularly during its run, but did her homework for her new role. “I had to do some catch up, yeah,” she said. “My brother, though, basically said to me, when I told him about it, he said, ‘You will die before I let you not do that show. You have to do it.’ He is obsessed.”

"And, of course, when I did get around to watching it, I just did it all in the space of about, I don’t know, two months on a lot of long flights and it’s absolutely riveting. I loved it."

HBO has already filmed a pilot for Blood Moon — there are even images of Watts in costume on set if you’re interested — so now we’re waiting to see whether it gets picked up to series. Despite how big Game of Thrones is, HBO is taking it slow when developing a successor. We’ve also heard that the network may order a pilot for another prequel show based on Fire & Blood, George R.R. Martin’s history of the Targaryen dynasty in Westeros. Does that mean they don’t like what they’ve seen of Blood Moon and are searching for a backup, or do they think both shows can coexist?

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These are the questions that keep us up at night as we contemplate the future of Game of Thrones. We’ll be looking out for answers.

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