Warning: Spoilers for Game Of Thrones season 8.
Game Of Thrones star Pilou Asbæk didn’t want Euron Greyjoy’s death to be shown in season eight episode five.
The Bells not only saw Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) lay waste to King’s Landing with the help of her dragon, but also the deaths of a string of major characters.
Varys (Conleth Hill), Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), The Hound (Rory McCann) and his brother The Mountain (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson) all bit the dust with just one episode to go before the series ends for good.
Euron also met his maker in the penultimate episode too, but we didn’t actually see it happen – and we have Asbæk to thank for that.
He explained to TheWrap: ‘The reason why I didn’t want to die [on-screen] is because I thought it would be so much fun to tease [showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss], because of course they wrote the scene as if he would die. So did [episode director Miguel Sapochnik], he wanted to direct it as if he would die.
‘But I didn’t want to do that, because you know sometimes you gotta take a piss at the showrunners. And I was like, “What if I don’t die? What if I just smile and look off?” And they were like, “Yeah, that’s nice.”‘
We’re not sure if that means Euron could come back to haunt everybody at some point in the finale, but the remaining characters have bigger fish to fry after Dany’s controversial behaviour, which made The Bells the worst-reviewed episode in GoT history.
Meanwhile Danish actor Coster-Waldau paid tribute to co-star Headey after the episode, calling her ‘the best, sweetest most wonderful sister from another mother’.
‘That was a fun decade,’ he added.
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However fans felt their deaths by falling rocks landing on them was anti-climatic given how villainous they’ve been since season one, episode one – as Bran Stark (Issac Hempstead Wright) knows.
Game Of Thrones concludes Monday at 2am and 9pm on Sky Atlantic. Seasons 1-7 are available on NOW TV.
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