HBO’s Game of Thrones Season 7 premiere date announcement turned from marketing stunt to debacle within minutes. Not only did their Facebook Live feed keep crashing, but it seems no one anticipated just how many agonizing eons it would take for their flamethrower to melt the ice block. Who knew anything involving flamethrowers could be boring? We’ve had ample opportunity to mock the messy announcement, but now, thanks to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, we know how it looked from the other side too.
Speaking to The Daily Beast at SXSW to promote his rural neo-noir Small Crimes (our review coming soon, spoiler: it’s bad), Coster-Waldau, best known as Jaime Lannister, described Game of Thrones creators Dan Weiss and David Benioff’s reaction to the disastrous rollout:
“I spoke to Dan and David about that and they were like, ‘Oh god… That’s embarrassing.’ Everyone was like, ‘What’s going to happen?’ ‘What’s going to happen?!’ ‘It’s melting!’ ‘It crashed!’ ‘Oh my god!’ It’s like, just walk away… just walk away. It’s just a date!”
It dragged on for so many agonizing minutes that Coster-Waldau compared the widespread mockery of the announcement to the angry fan reactions when a Game of Thrones character dies:
“You know, I was actually thinking, ‘Is there going to be a backlash and people will think, ‘Fuck you guys for that!’’ but that’s really happened with every time the show kills off a major character: Never again! Fuck you! I’m never going to watch this show! and, you know, they keep coming back.”
Like death, internet embarrassment lasts forever. Still, we’ve pulled the release date from the wreckage. Game of Thrones Season 7 premieres July 16.
