At New York Comic-Con on Friday, Liam Cunningham teased Game of Thrones fans with some Season 8 news. The scripts for the final episodes of the HBO series have been delivered to the actors, and filming of the last season begins in two weeks.
Cunningham revealed the shooting schedule for Game of Thrones during a panel for the upcoming Amazon anthology series, Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams.
“Yesterday, something quite monumental happened,” he explained. “I got the scripts for the last season. Well… kind of. There are about 450 things you have to do to open them, and I’ve only got through 200 of those, so I haven’t even seen the scripts yet.”
Judging from his description, it sounds like HBO is going to great lengths to prevent the type of massive story leaks that happened with Season 7. Back in 2016, months before Season 7 was set to premiere, a comprehensive outline of each episode circulated online. Those leaks proved to be remarkably accurate once the seventh season aired.
Cunningham and the rest of the cast will need to put those scripts to use soon, so here’s hoping he manages to figure out how to access them. “Tomorrow [Saturday Oct. 7] I fly back to Ireland, and the first table reading of the first three episodes is on Sunday. The second table reading is on Monday, we rehearse for the rest of the week, and then we start shooting the week after,” he said.
After the cheers and applause died down, Cunningham joked, “We’ll hopefully get a couple of people watching.”
Earlier in the week, Cunningham told TV Guide each of the six final-season episodes will be super-sized, and that filming will take longer than usual: “It’s definitely going to be bigger and what I hear is longer. We're filming right up until the summer. When you think about it, up until last season we'd have six months to do 10 episodes, so we're [doing] way more than that for six episodes. So that obviously will translate into longer episodes."
While Cunningham’s role as Ser Davos in the HBO hit came up briefly during the Electric Dreams panel at NYCC, the actor didn’t offer up any further details about what future episodes have in store for his character, or what we can expect from the battles ahead between Jon, Dany, Cersei and the Night King.
Those in attendance did get to see Cunningham without Davos' trademark beard in an image from ‘Human Is,’ his episode of the Philip K. Dick Amazon anthology. Looking up at himself, he quipped, “Look at me. I look like I’m twelve. I’m a chameleon.”
Do you think someone will manage to get hold of the Season 8 scripts and spoil the ending of Game of Thrones? Or do you think HBO has learned its lesson? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
- Fully realized, intricate world
- Compelling characters
- Plot twists you won't see coming
- Lots of ground to cover if you're new to the series
- Don't get too attached to anyone
- Two words: Sand Snakes
