In just a few short months HBO's hit fantasy series Game of Thrones will finally be coming to an end. Yes, the grand finale is almost upon us now, and fans are chomping at the bit to find out how it will all pan out. Which characters will survive? Who will sit on the Iron Throne? Can the Night King be defeated? And what the hell is going on with Jon and Daenerys? It's all up in the air at the moment, but we've been promised thrills, battles, romance and lots and lots of blood. Pretty standard stuff really; just dialed up to eleven.
However, despite all the frantic probing and prying of nosy fans, the showrunners (David Benioff and DB Weiss) haven't spilt any details of what we might expect when the last season finally airs. Currently, Game of Thrones is scheduled to premiere in April 2019, and the most info we've gathered so far is the short teaser trailer that the network released on social media, which shows Arya, Sansa and Jon Snow wandering through the catacombs of Winterfell.
When the promo aired, many fans started combing through the footage, looking for any scrap of symbolism that might hint at future plot threads. However, there was a pretty widespread misconception around the clip that we feel obliged to put to bed now: that teaser did not use actual footage from season eight. It was shot completely separate from the rest of the show, and should be considered as non-canon as a regular commercial.
This was confirmed by Sophie Turner (who plays Sansa Stark) in a recent interview with fan site Winter Is Coming:
"We did this promo for season eight where- I don’t know if I can say this, actually. Well, actually, no. It’s got nothing to do with the series; it’s just a promo. It was this big kind of statue of me, of Sansa, and I wanted to have it in the garden of my new house. But they obviously wouldn’t ship it from Belfast to New York."
Not only this, but Jon Snow's actor Kit Harrington also revealed that he was allowed to keep the statue of himself seen in the promo as a kind of freebie when filming wrapped, telling BBC radio's Zoe Ball that: "I’ve got it in my shed. How sad is that? I was the only one who kept their statue, that’s how narcissistic I am. I’m going to turn it into a water feature."
Harrington also stated that wrapping up the series has been emotional for him, stating: "You have this grief that it’s over, and that's exactly the same with doing nine years of this show, and no matter how it does end, there’s always going to be a kind of loss around it. So, maybe not happy, but very satisfied. I’m so excited for people to see it. I think it’s going to be extraordinary."
Me too Kit, me too...