Lyanna Mormont might have become a Game Of Thrones fan favourite through youthful sass, but the character wasn’t originally meant to be sticking around for long.
The leader of House Mormont, played by Bella Ramsey, first entered the series in the show’s sixth season, as one of the Northern leaders assembled by Jon Snow to rally against Ramsay Bolton who occupied Winterfell.
This first meeting, however, was seemingly meant to be the character’s only appearance, but showrunner David Benioff has explained how she became a reoccurring character due to Bella’s performance.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Benioff said: ‘Part of what excites me is the performance of these actors. So many of them have been with us since the beginning and they’ve grown – both literally for the kids, and as characters. In many cases they’re going so far beyond what was expected for them.
‘Some, like Lyanna Mormont, were just supposed to be in one scene. Bella is such an incredible actress that we kept bringing her back because we wanted more Bella.’
Teasing how the final season clicked into place, fellow showrunner Dan Weiss explained how this conclusion was foreshadowed from the very beginning.
‘From the beginning, there were all of these squabbles that were going on between people that seemed important happening against the backdrop of much larger and more momentous events that only a few people who lived on the fringes of the political world knew about,’ Weiss said.
‘If you live in the capital, everything that matters to you is happening right in front of you while the things happening in the flyover parts of the world don’t really matter.
‘So the things driving the story are from the edges of the earth, and it seems fitting that these things from the East and the North should come together to decide the fate of everybody in the middle, who didn’t even know them until recently.’
We’re mere days away from the first episode of Game Of Thrones season eight, and you can feast on trailer breakdowns here and here.
Game Of Thrones returns on 14 April on HBO and Sky Atlantic. And is available to watch on NOW TV.
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