Bran Stark, the Three-Eyed Raven, may have been able to see his destiny as the King of Westeros. But the actor who played him sure didn’t.
Isaac Hempstead Wright, who played Bran on “Game of Thrones,” told Entertainment Weekly Monday that when he first read that his character would be the one to sit on the Iron Throne, he felt it was so far-fetched that it had to be a prank.
“When I got to the [Dragonpit scene] in the last episode, and they’re like, ‘What about Bran?’ I had to get up and pace around the room,” he said. “I genuinely thought it was a joke script and that [showrunners] David and Dan sent to everyone a script where their own character ends up on the Iron Throne. I was like, ‘Yeah, good one guys. Oh shit! It’s actually real?!’”
This wouldn’t have been an unusual move for the show’s creators, David Benioff and Dan Weiss.
EW noted in an article published in April that they sent hoax scripts to cast members in the past, including a Season 1 scene sent to Kit Harington in which Jon Snow’s face was to be disfigured. In that same article, Maisie Williams also admitted that when she learned that her character Arya Stark would have a sex scene in the final season, she initially thought it was a joke as well.
As for Hempstead Wright, although he told ET that he was bummed he didn’t get “to die and get in one good death scene with an exploding head or something,” he’s pretty satisfied with the way the series ended. That is despite people petitioning for the final season to be re-done.
“It’s difficult to finish a series as popular as this without pissing some people off,” he told ET Monday. “I don’t think anybody will think it’s predictable and that’s as much as you can hope for. It’s ‘bittersweet,’ exactly as [author] George R.R. Martin intended. It’s a fitting conclusion to this epic saga.”