“Game of Thrones” Cast Members Addressed Fan Backlash Over The Final Season
Game of Thrones is over. That is, it’s over until the upcoming prequel series renders the offices of non-watchers completely annoying on Monday mornings once again. But the series ending doesn’t mean that the subset of GoT fans who despised the final season so much that they created a damn petition to have it redone have ceased frothing at the collective mouth. Some of the cast appeared at the GoT panel at fanperson mecca San Diego Comic-Con and addressed the backlash.
Note that GoT showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss dropped out of the panel at the last minute. They were smart because it reads like some of the fans brought their Ned Stark beheadin’ swords.
Vulture reports that the panel featured stars Isaac Hempstead-Wright, Conleth Hill, John Bradley, Maisie Williams, Jacob Anderson, Liam Cunningham, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The anticipation of rampaging sword-n-sorcery nerds bullshit over the lack of appropriate lighting for dragons screaming at the cast was so great that one of the SDCC heads pleaded for peace before it started.
The event began with SDCC Director of Programming Eddie Ibrahim basically imploring the crowd to be nice. “Even if we disagree sometimes,” he said, drawing a loud round of jeers from the crowd, “we do love all the content that is brought to us. We do love the shows and the movies.”
That only sort of worked. Coster-Waldau, who played incest-is-best swordsman Jaime Lannister, spoke on the petition and about complaints that the deaths of his character and his character’s lover/twin sister Cersei (played by Lena Headey) was anti-climactic. (Fun fact: Lena, who didn’t attend, agreed with the fans.)
“It was a surprising level… the absurdity of the online petition,” said Coster-Waldau, citing important plot points from previous seasons that also enraged fans.
“Every season we had huge controversies. From Ned Stark being killed and then there was the Red Wedding,” he went on. “So obviously when it comes to the end it’s gonna piss you off no matter what, because it’s the end.”
Nikolaj got some boos when he got into his character’s death.
In addressing the fates of Jamie and Cersei, Coster-Waldau told the crowd, “I thought it was a great ending. I thought it was perfect for him to end in the arms of Cersei. It made sense to me.”
#GameOfThrones‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau says that it was perfect for his character to “end in the arms of Cersei.” The #SDCC crowd disagrees pic.twitter.com/CSCi9F6abE
— Variety (@Variety) July 20, 2019
Conleth Hill, who played Lord Varys and was killed off in season 5, was a little more caustic about the petition.
Hill tackled the issue first. “You look at the amount of people who are here. We are here to thank you for watching us all those years,” he said. “This is the reality rather than a media-led hate campaign.”
The rest of the panel was mostly thanking fans and reminiscing about what a great time it was making HBO the new U.S. Mint. The prequel series will star Naomi Watts and Miranda Richardson and take place 1000s of years prior to the goings-on in GoT. It will reportedly premiere next year some time. So start writing that request to have your office cubicle moved into the basement now so you can avoid incessant talk about multiple-eyed ravens and multi-million dollar Dungeons & Dragons stories unable to hire people to remove coffee cups and water bottles from the set before filming.