Even The Actor Who Played Bran Stark Thought The Game Of Thrones Ending Was A Prank At First
E!- There’s a new king in the Seven—sorry, Six—Kingdoms. Warning, spoilers follow for the Game of Thrones series finale. After Jon Snow (Kit Harington) stabbed his aunt/lover/queen Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke), there was nobody left to sit on the Iron Throne. And there was no Iron Throne left either, but you get the drift. So, what were the lords and ladies of Westeros to do? The heads of all the great houses met and decided on a new king: Bran Stark.
Isaac Hempstead-Wright, the young man who grew up on screen playing Bran, thought the whole thing was a gag. “I genuinely thought it was a joke script and that [showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] sent to everyone a script with their own character ends up on the Iron Throne,” Hempstead-Wright told EW. “‘Yeah, good one guys. Oh s–t, it’s actually real?'”
I know the internet is divided over last night’s Game of Thrones episode just like it has been divided over this entire Game of Thrones season. But I will give George RR Martin credit for one thing. He gave us an ending that almost nobody outside of Vegas saw coming during the Reddit Age of the internet where a zillion internet sleuths are creating wildly entertaining theories about what will happen in a show that almost always end up being significantly better than anything the show’s writers could come up with.
Now is ending a show like Game of Thrones with a twist where a character pretty much nobody wanted to see become king actually become the king to the point the actor looked for hidden cameras because he thought he was being X’d punk by Michael Scott? That’s not for me to decide. George RR Martin wrote that ending in his head then Benioff & Weiss told it after fast forwarding through a shitload of extremely important material to wrap things up in 6 episodes flat. Does it kinda make sense that someone who doesn’t want the job of king yet knows the entire fucked up history of the world should get the job considering just how bad Westeros was when people who wanted the throne were fighting for it? I suppose. Could they have hypothetically just put Jon on the throne once Grey Worm’s fleet sailed past the horizon and whatever was left of the Iron Islands remembered that they have gotten their dicks kicked in (and chopped off) every time they entered a battle for almost the entire series? No doubt.
HOWEVAH, I will admit that as someone who was screaming from the mountaintops how important Bran Stark was going to be for two years now, I did take a little bit of pleasure in seeing my guy emerge as the winner in the Game of Thrones.
As well as the kid who plays Bran going MJ on all the haters.
#MyKing
In the end, the actor who played Bran felt the same way about his character’s big moment that many of the other Thrones actors felt about their character, which is…something I guess?
Hempstead-Wright knows having Bran become king wouldn’t sit well with everybody at home. “Not everyone will be happy,” he said. “It’s so difficult to finish a series as popular as this without pissing some people off. I don’t think anybody will think it’s predictable and that’s as much as you can hope for. People are going to be angry. There’s going to be a lot of broken hearts. It’s ‘bittersweet,’ exactly as [saga author] George R.R. Martin intended. It’s a fitting conclusion to this epic saga.”
Again, I truly believe if Benioff and Weiss had 20 episodes to fit in everything from the last six weeks, millions of people would have been much happier. Then again, I don’t know how many of those people would have walked away happy if the weirdo kid with the supercomputer brain ended up as the king when it was all said and done.
But that is neither here nor there. Bran The Broken is officially the new king of Westeros and the one true ruler of all your favorite characters. Long may he reign.
For more reactions to Bran winning the throne and all things Game of Thrones finale/final season related, listen to last night’s Game of Stools here: