How ‘Game Of Thrones’ Is Prevent Leaks In Season 8

As one of the most successful series in TV right now, Game of Thrones has had quite a bit of trouble with people desperately trying to get intel on Westeros’ nail-biting adventures before anyone else. Back in 2016, a batch of spoilers for the then-unreleased seventh season of GoT hit the internet. It was a massive leak that caught fans by surprise and pretty much took the suspense out of every episode (if you were brave enough to read them). Unfortunately for HBO, the show’s trouble with leaks didn’t stop there.

Just a few months later, unidentified hackers stole five Season 7 scripts and threatened to release them unless they were paid hefty sums of money. The situation eventually got resolved, but that, paired with the aforementioned 2016 hack, left #HBO with a huge question: How could they stop the constant #GameOfThrones leaks from happening? Thankfully, the company has found a solution, and it proves how committed the minds behind the show are to keeping our final trip through #Westeros as well kept a secret as possible.

Here’s How HBO Is Keeping ‘GoT’ Spoilers To A Minimum

The GoT cast and crew are currently working hard on Season 8 and during these pre-production days, actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau took some time out of his busy schedule to sit down for an interview with Skavlan, a Scandinavian chat show. During their talk, the actor explained that security measures on GoT were fairly simple for its first two seasons, as actors received physical copies of their scripts.

That eventually changed and the people responsible for bringing the world of Westeros to life started receiving digital files. Then security got even stronger later on, and the company sent scripts through verified emails.

Now, HBO is employing a surprising method to keep spoilers to a minimum. As Coster-Waldau revealed, actors won’t be given scripts to film Season 8. Instead, they’re equipped with an earpiece through which they’re given their lines as the scene is shooting.

This isn’t the first time that Coster-Waldau has addressed the show’s efforts to keep information secretive. On the eve of HBO’s massive script hack over the summer, the actor weighed in on what the company could do to combat future leaks, stating that the best course of action would be to ditch digital sharing and go back to the old ways of script-reading:

“I think they’re basically going to go back to hand-delivering and just giving us scripts. Just give us the hard copies instead of all this email and digital stuff. I think that’s what’s going to happen in a few years’ time, because you know, you talk to cops on the street, ‘What’s the biggest crime now?’ It’s all credit card fraud. It’s all that stuff. It’s digital. So we got to go back to cash.”

It looks like HBO went a different route, but it’s frankly much more functional and less risky. Yes, earpieces are normally used for actors who don’t learn their lines, but that’s sure to keep the story from leaking for the next couple of years.

I can’t help but wonder whether this is only the first step in HBO’s grand plan to keep Season 8 under wraps. In March of 2016, for example, Entertainment Weekly revealed that for Season 6, the company was going all out with the mystery by avoiding press screenings, and tightening its exclusive circle of trust: “Press won’t get advanced screeners. HBO’s affiliates worldwide can expect to get content much closer to airtime. Even internally on the show, the ‘circle of trust’ was tightened — code words were routinely used to describe certain scenes or characters, even by the showrunners themselves.”

With that in mind, who knows? Perhaps the company will take things one step further once again and make the situation even more difficult for people looking to learn more about the show before it’s released. It’s currently unclear when Season 8 of Game of Thrones will be with us, but it’s been speculated that it’ll drop some time in 2018.

What do you think about the tight security measures surrounding the Game of Thrones Season 8 scripts? Do you think this will be the most secure season yet? Let me know in the comments!

[Sources: The Associated Press; Entertainment Weekly]