Game of Thrones had one of the most notoriously unpopular endings in TV history, but former star Sean Bean admits that he still doesn’t know anything about it. Bean played the stoic Ned Stark in Season 1 of the HBO fantasy adaptation, and he still gets questions about the role to this day. In an interview with The Times last Thursday, he confessed that he never finished Game of Thrones.
Interviewer Ed Potton asked Bean whether he had seen the ending of Game of Thrones, perhaps half-jokingly, but Bean answered ironically: “No, what happened?” Potton offered to scrap that line of questioning so that Bean wouldn’t get unwanted spoilers for the blockbuster series, but Bean said: “I’ll have forgotten by then, go on. So did Winterfell stay separate? Oh, good for them.” Potton apparently informed him that his character’s children inherited Winterfell and seceded from the rest of Westeros, holding The North as a separate kingdom.
Hehe, I bet he doesn’t know if Frodo made it to Mordor either. https://t.co/xdl1YsqrsS
— Lisa 🦊 (@lisaloulaa) May 31, 2021
Potton went on to ask Bean about the real-life Brexit movement in relation to this Winterfell secession — an interesting question, though difficult for Bean to answer without having seen the show. Fans went wild on social media when they learned that Bean had never bothered to finish the series.
“Don’t watch Sean. Just be happy with the season you were in,” tweeted YouTuber Daniel Greene. Another fan added: ‘I totally get why he wouldn’t know. I mean this was a job to him. He knows wardrobe and makeup and dry script readings. The interest wouldn’t be fan base, it’s compensation-based. When it’s over it’s over.”
Fans of the show were left perplexed when Game of Thrones rushed to its ending with shortened final seasons, which left many questions unanswered. Many believe that the showrunners were rushing to reach conclusions that had been laid out for them by author George R.R. Martin, who still has not finished the books that the show was adapted from, A Song of Ice and Fire.
This means many fans are more eager than ever for the books, where they believe the same plot points will play out but with more context. Many are excited to see how the Stark children will reclaim the north, fight off the White Walkers, seize the Iron Throne and leave to go exploring, all with the nuance and pacing that the show lacked.
Martin promises that the novels will be coming soon after a productive year in quarantine writing. In the meantime, the main series is available on Amazon here in print, digital and audiobook formats. Game of Thrones itself is streaming on HBO Max.
