Game Of Thrones' cast and crew will say anything to stave off spoilers
Look, it’s understandable that Game Of Thrones has gone a bit bananas with paranoia: After the massive HBO hack that laid bare the entire behind-the-scenes operation of the series, it’s not surprising that they’ve gone overboard with being guarded.
But fear of the ending being leaked in advance has driven the creative team behind the upcoming final season to truly absurdist lengths. It began a couple months ago with news of a massive wall being built around the set, on which we can only assume the production resisted putting giant tinfoil hats through sheer force of will. And now, building on an earlier report saying that actors aren’t being shown full scripts, a new interview with Emilia Clark in The Telegraph suggests things are only getting more ridiculous when it comes to fear of spoilers. Clarke says even the actors don’t know how their stories end, because D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have “written a number of different endings … none of the cast know what the actual ending is. If there’s ever a leak of any kind, don’t believe it because it’s probably not true.”
As Vanity Fair points out, this is just as likely to be bullshit as it is to be accurate. Weiss and Benioff have known since 2014 how the narrative would end, meaning they’ve had almost four years to give indications to the actors what will happen to their characters. Better yet, by sticking to a party line of “nobody knows what’s true and what’s not,” it allows them to spend the next year demurring on any questions of how the show ends, dismissing any leaks or potential spoilers as phony. It also makes them sound a little bit like victims of dissociative reality disorder unable to determine what’s real and what isn’t, but whatever makes life easier.
Clarke adds that the cast have been given a “strict social-media ban” this year, in order to help prevent fans from piecing together storylines based on nothing more than whatever’s in frame on a random Instagram post. All this secrecy and dissembling seems extreme, until you remember the dedication of people spending their lives trying to unearth spoilers for a show they supposedly love, and then you remember who the truly crazy ones are.