Bran Stark actor Isaac Hempstead-Wright has opened up about the Game of Thrones finale following its airing on Sunday, May 19. Bran ended up taking the Throne and becoming the King of the Six Kingdoms, but he knew that not everyone would be happy with how the show played out.
“Not everyone will be happy,” Hempstead-Wright said in an interview with Complex. “It’s so difficult to finish a series as popular as this without pissing some people off. I don’t think anybody will think it’s predictable and that’s as much as you can hope for. People are going to be angry. There’s going to be a lot of broken hearts. It’s ‘bittersweet,’ exactly as [author] George R.R. Martin intended. It’s a fitting conclusion to this epic saga.”
When discussing the episode, Hempstead-Wright admitted that he first thought the ending was a prank.
“When I got to the [Dragonpit scene] in the last episode and they’re like, ‘What about Bran?’ I had to get up and pace around the room. I genuinely thought it was a joke script and that [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] sent to everyone a script with their own character ends up on the Iron Throne. ‘Yeah, good one guys. Oh sh*t, it’s actually real?’”
The Throne was melted by Daenerys’ dragon Drogon, but Bran was still the one to take control.
Hempstead-Wright previously discussed the Game of Thrones series in an op-ed, and admitted that it had become a huge part of his life.
“It would be hard to overstate just how important a part of my life Game of Thrones has been,” he wrote in the Hollywood Reporter. “Practically every key life event I have ever experienced is in some way connected to my time on Thrones. Having finally reached this milestone in TV history and my own personal history, I am looking back on these unique and formative years of my life.”
Now, we will have to see what the next step in the actor’s career will be.