See George R.R. Martin with white-blonde Targaryen hair in 1991

Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin finds an old interview of himself from 30 years ago, and has thoughts about his look.

As Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin said in a recent blog post, you never know what you’re going to stumble on when you surf the web. The other day, Martin happened to stumble on himself giving an interview in 1991, a few years before A Game of Thrones hit bookshelves. Enjoy this blast from the past:

Martin talks lucidly in this interview about fandom and science fiction, which he notes is what people used to ask him about before A Song of Ice and Fire hit the scene. “I don’t think anybody reads science fiction in order to find out what the future is going to be like,” he muses. “If they did, they’d go crazy. For every right prediction in a science fiction story, there are a thousand terribly wrong predictions.”

"Any literature is written for the contemporary audience…It’s meant for the audience here and now and it’s only to the extent that it speaks to that contemporary audience that it is successful or it is a failure."

Those are all very interesting observations, but let’s address the elephant in the room: Martin’s hair. He’s wearing it long here, and it’s white-blonde at the top — it almost looks like Targaryen hair to me — and gradients into dark at the bottom, complete with a dark beard. It is mesmerizing.

For reference, Martin was around 43 years old here, if the interview is indeed from 1991. “I don’t remember that hair,” he writes on his Not a Blog. “My hair was dark brown when I was young. When I got older, it went to gray and then white. Judging from this clip, I guess 1991 was when it changed, but I don’t ever recall it being half-and-half like that, or having a dark beard with white hair. But I guess I did.”

Personally, I think he went home later that day, looked in the mirror, and was inspired to create Daenerys Targaryen.

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