[Spoilers for Game Of Thrones season 8, episode 6.]
Bran Stark, the weird, all-knowing Game Of Thrones goon known for bailing on giant battles with an indifferent “I’m going to go now,” is king because sure, okay, but actor Isaac Hempstead-Wright, like most of the audience, surely didn’t expect as much. “I genuinely thought it was a joke script and that [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] sent to everyone a script with their own character ends up on the Iron Throne. ‘Yeah, good one guys. Oh shit, it’s actually real?’” he told Entertainment Weekly.
Hempstead-Wright thinks Bran will be “a really good king,” though he acknowledges that “perhaps there will be something missing in having a real emotive leader.” Still, Bran knows everything, sees the future, and can probably levitate shit with his mind, so we’re good. He might’ve been even happier, though, if the youngest Stark met a fate not unlike that of his brother, Robb, who, once upon a time, was torn to shreds during The Red Wedding.
“I’m happy,” he said. “Though I kind of did want to die and get in one good death scene with an exploding head or something.”
That sounds like an extra-cruel fate for a kid whose childhood evaporated the moment Jaime Lannister pushed him from a tower window, but now we can’t stop imagining Bran’s noggin swelling grotesquely as the Three-Eyed Raven crammed every last bit of Westerosi lore into his brain, then popping and splattering all over Hodor’s face. Hey, maybe they can work it into that “remake” of the final season that’s definitely happening.