As Game Of Thrones approaches its final season, HBO is going to extreme lengths to make sure that nobody knows what’s going to happen in the last few episodes – not even the actors themselves, apparently.
In a recent interview with the Swedish talk show Skavlan, Nijolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays Jaime Lannister on the show, revealed that the cast themselves won’t even be getting scripts for the final batch of episodes.
He said that, in the early days of Thrones, the key actors would get their scripts in old-fashioned printed form; as the show became more popular and successful, they were given scripts in digital files, and then via verified email.
Now things are even more drastic. “We’re not even going to get the script,” he said, revealing that the actors in each scene will be given earpieces and fed their lines of dialogue as they need to deliver them, line-by-line.
(In other words, then, the final run of Thrones episodes is going to be like a more murder-y version of Matty J‘s season of The Bachelor – while that could be a complete mess, I’m also pretty keen to see how something like that would look).
The caution on HBO’s part is fairly understandable, given that a few months ago, they were hit with a serious data breach, and faced ransom demands of several million dollars from hackers who threatened to leak Thrones episodes online.
The network’s programming director Casey Bloys previously revealed some of the other measures the show will take to avoid leaks, including shooting multiple endings. He said:
“I know in Game of Thrones, the ending, they’re going to shoot multiple versions so that nobody really know what happens. You have to do that on a long show. Because when you’re shooting something, people know. So they’re going to shoot multiple versions so that there’s no real definitive answer until the end.”
The premiere date for the eighth and final season of the show has yet to be revealed.
