Game of Thrones star says they filmed an “alternative ending”

Yesterday, a trio of Game of Thrones stars — Isaac Hempstead Wright, Gemma Whelan and Kristofer Hivju — reunited for a series retrospective at the British Film Institute, where they also promoted the upcoming home video release of the eighth and final season of the show. As you can see, they looked marvelous.

I’m sure video of the event will be forthcoming — the event also featured the premiere of some deleted scenes spotlighted on the home video release — but for now, Radio Times was on hand to pick up some of what Wright said about his character ending up on the Iron Throne. “I would obviously say this, but I think that Bran had the best character arc of anybody,” Wright said. “In the very first episode, you think, ‘He’s toast, he’s dead’ and he grows and learns… the hard way about a lot of things, and he goes from being this vulnerable character to the most powerful person there is.”

"I was pretty happy just with him becoming the Three-Eyed Raven. I thought, ‘What a great story for this boy, this disabled 10-year-old in the harshest world ever to triumph’ – so to see him become king and victorious, I think it’s so brilliant, to have a disabled character win the whole game of thrones. It was really special."

Hail to the king.

As satisfied as Wright was with where his character ended up, he did have one regret: that he never got to participate in one of the show’s much-ballyhooed action scenes. “Whenever I was on-set with somebody with a sword, I’d be like, ‘Ooh, can I play with it?’ – even when Bran got given that really cool dagger in season seven, he gave that away!”

At the same event, Hivju — who played the wildling Tormund Giantsbane — talked to Metro about the ending of the show, King Bran and all. “The funny thing is after season seven I had my theories, fans ahead theirs’, everybody the cast had their theories so there were thousands of theories,” he said. “To choose one path would be difficult to say but there were many things I didn’t see coming; there was the element of surprise which I liked.”

I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people were surprised by the ending. Interestingly, Hivju says that there’s another one out there somewhere, although it doesn’t sound like we’ll ever see it. “Well, we shot an alternative ending,” he said. ‘That was mostly for fun but I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you about that.”

Any details you can provide on that, Tormund? “I won’t tell you!” Kristopher laughed. “But it was fun.”

Before people get too excited, I very much doubt that he’s talking about a proper-sized ending that could have been aired as an alternative to what we got. It’s pretty well-known that the producers filmed a bunch of fake scenes for season 8 to throw people off the scent, like a never-aired meeting between Jon Snow and Cersei Lannister in King’s Landing. I’m guessing this “alternative ending” is something more along those lines.

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Hivju also talked about trying to work something about Tormund from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books into the show. “In the novels, he’s older… and he says ‘HA!’ all the time,” Hivju recalled. Any Song of Ice and Fire fan can confirm that he speaks the truth, basically. “I felt like I was betraying the fans, because I didn’t say ‘HA!’ – I always tried to put it in, and [was always] suggesting it, and they were like, ‘We’ll just keep that out…’”

"He started off [on the show] as an antagonist, as a guy who was a threat, an enemy to the realm, and he became part of Team Jon Snow, and suddenly fell in love [with Brienne]… I don’t think that was George RR Martin at all! That’s the beauty of a TV show – that they [the writers] can use the best things they find and create something new."

In any case, you can peek behind the curtain of the season 8 home video release — as well as Game of Thrones: The Complete Collection — comes out on December 3!

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h/t Radio Times