In 2017, musician Ed Sheeran appeared in an episode of Game of Thrones. It was the episode "Stormborn" from season 7. Arya Stark was riding towards King's Landing, on her way to kill Cersei Lannister. She stops to visit with a group of friendly Lannister soldiers, none of whom are fans of the city. One of them is played by Ed Sheeran, who we hear off-camera singing a song:
Honestly, I always liked this scene. It humanizes the everyday soldiers on the ground, making us think twice about automatically associating Lannisters with evil and greed; these guys aren't high-born, they're just peasants hired by the Lannisters to fight in a war they likely won't benefit from. But at the time, the scene got a lot of attention because Ed Sheeran was in it. There was some snarky chatter online that he was too distracting.
Vanity Fair asked Sheeran about the cameo recently after hooking him up to a lie detector. “I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, and when they asked me to cameo, I said yes," he remembered. "I imagine anyone else in the same situation would’ve done the same thing."
"I think at the time, I was very overexposed, and people hated me anyway. But yeah, there’s loads of pop stars that have been in Games of Thrones as cameos."
It's true that a lot of musicians appeared on Game of Thrones over the years, from Mastodon to Sigur Rós to Will Champion, the drummer for Coldplay, who played drums during the Red Wedding; I'm guessing showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss used the show's popularity as an excuse to meet some of their favorite artists. It's also true that Ed Sheeran was everywhere back in 2017; that was the year "Shape of You" came out, and you couldn't go three feet without hearing it playing somewhere.
So maybe his huge popularity had something to do with people not enjoying his Game of Thrones cameo, which on its face was pretty innocuous. Vanity Fair asked if Sheeran thinks his fans will ever "forgive" him for the cameo, which I think is a weird question; what's to forgive? But Sheeran took it in stride. “Like, maybe," he said. "As I’ve said, there’s [are] a lot of people in the world. 50% of the people who know my music like it, 50% absolutely hate it. There’s no one in the middle that’s indifferent. So yeah, it’s very polarizing. So the people who really hate me are never gonna forgive me. And the people that like me, don’t care."
Well, I can kinda take or leave his music. I fall outside the love-hate binary, Sheeren! Now I understand why everyone hated the cameo.
Kidding. As for Sheeran's next onscreen role, he's ready: “I’ve been asked to be a sheep in a Disney film,” he quipped.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.