John Bradley is the Game of Thrones cast member of the moment: he has not one but two major motion pictures out in theaters right now: the sci-fi disaster film Moonfall and the romantic comedy Marry Me, where he stars alongside Jennifer Lopez. Samwell Tarly is doing alright.
That also means he’s giving interviews left and right to talk about these projects. That’s fun, but I feel for the guy a bit because every journalist he speaks to inevitably asks some variation on the question, “So a lot of people hated the Game of Thrones finale; what do you think of that?” and he has to come up with something new.
That cycle continued in a recent interview with NME. “We were never going to please everybody,” Bradley said of the controversial ending to the show. “People had invested too much.”
John Bradley was “disappointed” in the reaction to the Game of Thrones series finale
At the end of eight seasons, Game of Thrones ended with Daenerys Targaryen torching the people of King’s Landing before getting assassinated by Jon Snow. Bran Stark ultimately ended up on (what’s left of) the Iron Throne. Fans have debated the merits of these turns ad nauseam for literally years now. My personal take: the idea behind the ending was good, but the execution was lacking in some key areas.
In the wake of the finale, fans took to Twitter and elsewhere to express their disappointment in apocalyptic terms. Sure, there were reasonable critiques out there, but the mind has a way of remembering only the angry, weirdly personal vitriol, much of it directed at showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss.
It was an ugly internet pile-on that will live in infamy. I didn’t personally like the ending, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the reaction to the ending. Bradley is close to the mark when he says that some “fans lost their minds.” He takes particular umbrage with some of the conspiracy theories that cropped up in the wake of the finale, specifically the notion that the cast and crew “knew it was going to be rubbish,” which is far from the truth. “We genuinely wanted it to be great,” he said. “We genuinely thought it was going to be great. We were really proud of it. We weren’t arrogant enough to think: ‘Oh we’ll just put it out there and they’ll swallow it’. We only ever wanted people to like it… I was really disappointed.”
Through the looking glass of Game of Thrones meta-conspiracy theories
That idea — that the cast and crew didn’t try their hardest to make the final season as good as it could be — always seemed weird to me, too. I mean, you can take one look at any given episode of Game of Thrones and see how much effort went into it, especially the sprawling action set pieces of season 8. Do I think that less time should have been spent on that and more time on the scripts? Absolutely. But the good faith effort was never in question.
And yet, there was a narrative that the showrunners knew the ending was bad but just didn’t care. Where did that come from? My theory is that fans who wanted to disparage the showrunners crafted a story to fit their needs. Because what we have with season 8 is an example of a cast and crew doing the best they can to make great television and falling short. And people could sympathize with that; you put forth all that effort and this is the result? Ooh, you poor thing.
But if that’s the story, it’s hard to justify calling the showrunners monsters. So instead some folks opted to create a reality where the showrunners were acting maliciously or negligently, ignoring signs to the contrary or mitigating factors like the fatigue that sets in when you devote the whole of your life to making a complicated television show for over a decade; that way those fans could lambast the showrunners without feeling like they’re behaving badly.
So that’s my conspiracy theory about a conspiracy theory. You can see Bradley in Moonfall and Marry Me right now!
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels