Bran Stark has been one of the more perplexing aspects of the new season of Game of Thrones. He’s not the boy we knew. Withdrawn and distant, he’s now concerned with the survival of humanity to the exclusion of everything else, including expressing joy when reuniting with his sisters or having much of a personality. As a tearful Meera Reed told him when she left Winterfell in “The Spoils of War,” “you died in that cave.”
“Sadly, I think in many ways she was right,” star Isaac Hempstead Wright said on HBO’s Making Game of Thrones blog. It’s just this whole idea that Bran has become a much smaller part of the character’s brain, when before 100% of his head was taken up with being Bran Stark. Now, that’s just one tiny file in a huge system. But certainly, he’s almost completely a different character. He acts utterly differently, and really any semblance of personality he used to have has gone.”
That said, we’ve been waiting for this to happen since the beginning. It’s Bran’s fate to become the Three-Eyed Raven. That has been his destiny from day one; this is where his story arc has been leading up to from the moment he got pushed out of that tower. So the fact we’re here now is actually a bit of a relief. While he may not be that same character, he now has got a lot more to offer. He’s now an incredibly powerful character now; having all the knowledge in the world puts you in a seriously advantageous position.
Okay, but is there any of the old Bran in there? The kid who loved climbing so much he started the War of the Five Kings? The boy who was stating to fall for Meera? The teenager who got so moody he decided to take the time machine out for a spin without adult supervision and get his protectors killed? “There is a flicker of Bran left in him,” Wright admitted, “but really, can you imagine putting the entire history of the universe, every single moment, every single second that ever existed in one person’s brain? You’d think it would just short circuit. Bran just becomes this calm, zen character. He’s really like a human supercomputer.”
And being a supercomputer means that family reunions aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Wright loved working with Sophie Turner (Sansa) and Maisie Williams (Arya) in the latest episode — after all, the three of them practically grew up together while working on this show — but for the characters, the experience was awkward. “I think it’s most shocking for Sansa and Arya to see what Bran is like,” Wright explained, “because they still have fundamentally the same character traits as they did when they were young: Arya is this spunky, fierce girl, and Sansa is this diplomatic lady. But Bran has definitely become somebody they wouldn’t recognize otherwise.”
[I]t’s easier for Arya to believe what happened to him, because she’s seen that weird side of the world exists. Sansa has only really been exposed to the human side of Game of Thrones. So immediately Arya and Bran have more in common, and they can both accept that what’s happened to the other isn’t completely implausible. Whereas for Sansa, it’s a bit like, “You’re saying you can change faces, and you’re saying you can see everything? Have both my siblings gone completely mad?”
Going back to the notion that the old Bran isn’t 100% gone, Wright made it clear that Bran knew what he was doing when he freaked out Petyr Baelish by parroting his catch phrase — “Chaos is a ladder” — back to him. “That was my favorite scene to film this season. It was so neat to say something that cool. The fact that Bran heard that line means that he’s gone back and looked through Mr. Baelish’s timeline. His intention is to slightly rattle Littlefinger, to say, in just a subtle, really creepy way, ‘I know what you’re up to.’”
Good — there’s enough Bran left for him to kind of enjoy making Littlefinger uncomfortable. That’s comforting.
If Bran has the presence of mind to do that to Littlefinger, you have to wonder if he has a bigger plan in mind when he gives the Valyrian steel dagger to Arya Stark, although Wright doesn’t think there’s anything more to it than what we saw. As he points out, “Bran is never going to be a warrior. I don’t anticipate us ever seeing Bran charging on horseback toward a dragon like Jaime Lannister.” Bran’s strength lies in his mind, “[j]ust like Samwell Tarly.” He can’t use the dagger, so “what better character to wield this fantastic weapon than the master swordswoman Arya?”
Finally, Wright touched on the unique challenges of playing the new Bran, who has more mystery about him than the old one. “It was definitely difficult to get it right,” he said. “I had a meeting with [series creators] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], and they wanted him to be quite monotone and agenda-less, but at the same time have a slight flair, so it wasn’t just like listening to a robot talk.”
There had to be a sense of mystery and wisdom to him. He was sort of inspired by Dr. Manhattan in The Watchmen series — being in all these places at once, in all these time zones at once. I tried to base it on the old Three-Eyed Raven [played by Max von Sydow in Season 6] and have a sense of this wise, old, man sitting in a tree. At the same time, still have that slight spark somewhere in there where you know this is Bran Stark. It was a fine balance.
Bran will never walk again. But he will fly. And maybe crack a smile once in a while, but we can’t expect miracles.
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