Game Of Thrones Creators Explain What Happens When You 'Kill A Couple Dozen Characters'

Game of Thrones Season 7 premieres July 16, less than three weeks from now. It’s about time for the press blitz, already feverish, to ramp up into full-blown pandemic mode. Which means lots of interviews with various cast members as they say essentially nothing, followed by headlines trumpeting how this or that minor comment cements this or that fan theory or implies this or that something or other.

Yes, this is one of those posts. But the source material is a little more interesting this time, as Entertainment Weekly has published its big interview with Game of
Thrones writers and showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff, the only people actually allowed to expose concrete things about upcoming episodes of Game of Thrones. Not that they do here, but it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than “ Aidan Gillen Says His Character Did A Thing In His Imagination.”

Here are some of the highlights.

Both Weiss and Benioff emphasize that Season 7 isn’t just about the largest-scale battles the show has yet seen, but also about the clashes of personality that emerge from previously geographically-separated characters meeting each other. “To me what’s most exciting is being able to play interactions between various characters that for years we haven’t been able to play. There’s a whole bunch of reunions and first time meetings that people have been waiting for for a long time and when you put it on paper you just want to do justice to the work that these guys have done building these characters over so many years,” Weiss said.

This clash of personalities — bringing together characters in unexpected new configuration — is enhanced by death, death, and yes, more death. “If you kill enough people, if you kill a couple dozen characters, the people who are left just by default need to carry more dramatic weight,” Weiss said. “As the worlds start to converge characters who haven’t met each other before start to meet each other and there are more and more main characters together in each other’s storylines than there have ever been before.”

But there’s one pairing we won’t see, the pairing Weiss and Benioff agreed they’d love to see mix it up: Tyrion and Drogo. “I feel like they would eventually get to like each other. They’re from two different worlds but they would bond over their love of fermented yak milk or whatever and would eventually become good buddies.”

Their other flight of fancy came courtesy of Benioff, riffing, “We could have a eunuch episode where we get Varys, Theon and Grey Worm together to fight crime.”

There are also a handful of little trivia items, like Benioff revealing that “we set more stuntmen on fire in one of these shots than have ever been simultaneously set on fire.” Or that Game of Thrones Season 7 will feature both the shortest episode — 50 minutes — and the longest — “around 90 minutes.”

Fans of Tormund creeping on Brienne, which seems to be pretty much everyone, might be interested to learn that one of their best moments together didn’t appear in the script. “There was the episode where they’re all leaving Castle Black together and there’s a shot — it wasn’t scripted at all — of two of them on horseback and she looks at him and he smiles at her. It’s not something you could ever write,” Weiss told EW. “I saw it 150 times and every time it made me laugh.”

“It inspires us because we need to kill one of them now because there can’t be a happy ending or any romantic connection on the show,” Benioff said. “But we’re not going to tell you which one.”

You have until July 16 (or perhaps a later episode date) to place your bets on who survives: Tormund or Brienne.