Joe Dempsie on why Game of Thrones ending backlash was “inevitable”

Game of Thrones star Joe Dempsie (Gendry) thinks a surfeit of fan theories help explain the backlash to the show’s final season.

Joe Dempsie, aka Gendry the blacksmith-turned-lord, made waves when he returned to Game of Thrones after nearly four seasons spent rowing across the Narrow Sea. It was a pleasant surprise to see him pop up in season 7.

It also led to plenty of theories about Gendry’s role in the story, some of which had been around for a long time. Could Gendry be Cersei’s secret son? Might he even be able to ride a dragon? His great-grandmother was a Targaryen, after all.

Of course, most of the theories did not come to fruition. Speaking to Digital Spy, Dempsie said he thought that had something to do with the deeply polarized reaction to the final season. “In the years leading up to season 8, there was not a moment when I envied [showrunner David Benioff and Dan Weiss’] task of bringing this thing to a conclusion that was broadly satisfying but also surprising,” he said. “One of the major components of Game of Thrones‘ success was that it was a show that lends itself so well to almost endless theorizing about how it’s going to end, so they had to find a way to do that that hadn’t already been widely suggested on the internet. I guess almost every eventuality probably had been suggested on the internet already, and audiences want to be surprised.”

"Even if your prediction was exactly how the show ended up finishing, you would have had about 10 minutes of smugness before you felt really pissed off that it hadn’t surprised you in the way you were hoping, so I think it was inevitable there was going to be a backlash and the ending wasn’t going to please everyone."

I’d be surprised if someone predicted the exact ending we got. If anyone saw King Bran the Broken coming, I’d love to talk to you, because I was caught off-guard.

Overall, Dempsie enjoyed the ending, but he had an inkling that some fans might be upset. “I think that the final episode was the building blocks of a new society, and how you can hopefully give everyone a stake – everyone in society has a stake in how it would be governed,” he said. “And that was the message of the finale. And I think, you know, if there’s that much reaction, it’s something I think you should come to expect now, really. I didn’t agree with it, but I remember – I didn’t agree with it but I wasn’t surprised.”

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