In television, a character is never really dead until you see the body. In Game Of Thrones, even being dead doesn’t mean staying dead. That said, HBO showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have confirmed the most obscure off-screen Game Of Thrones death in the entire series: Ser Pounce is no more.
Yes, the feline friend of young king Tommen Baratheon, who first rocked up in Season 4 of the epic fantasy series, met his demise away from the eyes of viewers. Notably, he didn’t die when Tommen’s mum Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) exploded the Sept of Baelor. No, Benioff and Weiss say Cersei killed Ser Pounce in an even crueller way.
“Cersei hated the name ‘Ser Pounce’ so much she could not allow him to survive,” Benioff told the outlet, adding “Ser Pounce’s death was so horrible we couldn’t even put it on the air.”
Take a moment to imagine a Game Of Thrones death more graphically violent than oh, we don’t know, any of the nine thousand gory ends the show has presented.
“If you buy the super-extended, super-charged Game of Thrones box set that comes out, the death of Ser Pounce will be in there,” Weiss said.
“Just one whole episode devoted to the death of Ser Pounce.”
Ser Pounce was introduced around the time Tommen took the throne, but vanished from the series shortly after.
There’s one explanation why the cat disappeared, outside of the fact there were far more important things to focus on after Tommen’s death: both Dean-Charles Chapman and Natalie Dormer, who portrayed his on-screen lover Margaery Tyrell, have spoken about how difficult it was working with that goddamn cat.
In 2016, Chapman told The Huffington Post that on the day of shooting, the cat “would have none of it. He was just loving life. He just really wasn’t on his game that day.”
In a Reddit AMA, Dormer added “Ser Pounce was a bit of a diva that day, he didn’t want to stay on the bed, he was very difficult to work with.”
There you have it. RIP Ser Pounce, yet another casualty of Cersei Lannister (and being totally unfazed by the show’s production).
