Of all the characters on Game of Thrones, Bran Stark may have changed the most, which is saying something. He started off a precocious young boy who wanted to be a knight, but by season 7, he was the Three-Eyed Raven, an emotionless psychic largely unconcerned with anything not having to do with the invasion of the army of the dead.
Along the way, he creeped out a fair number of people, including his sister Sansa and Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish. Talking to Vulture, star Isaac Hempstead Wright apologized for some of Bran’s strange behavior, particularly the moment in “The Queen’s Justice” when he alluded to the night Sansa married Ramsay Bolton in the Winterfell godswood:
Yeah, sorry about that. There were some cool bits to get to play, less so that creepy moment with Sansa. That was weird. I don’t think Bran meant that in a weird way; I don’t think he’s trying to freak his sister out by going, “Yeah, I know everything. Don’t fuck with me.” It’s more like Bran is processing everything he’s seen, like, “I’ve seen you there. That happened to you. I’m sorry for what happened to you.” Bran has lost that emotional connection. He just states what he sees in an almost autistic way, not really connecting with things but just saying how they are.
Wright was more on board for the moment in “The Spoils of War” when Bran calls out Littlefinger. “Saying “chaos is a ladder” to Littlefinger was so cool, though. I felt so badass in that scene, like, “Chaos is a ladder … yeeaaaah. How do you like that, Littlefinger?”
Wright also shed some light on a questions fan had at the end of the season 7 finale: if Bran can see everything, why did he need Sam to tell him that Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark were married? “The way I understand, it works like Bran has access,” Wright said. “It’s like he’s got a Kindle library of every book of everything that’s ever happened in the world. He can access any of it in a heartbeat, but he hasn’t yet sat there and read it all. The old Three-Eyed Raven had a thousand years to sit in that cave to read every single page of everything that’s happened in the universe, and therefore be completely all knowing. Bran isn’t completely omniscient. He can look up anything he wants, but he hasn’t got it all by heart yet.”
At that moment [in the finale], Bran was like, “Oh, yup, Rhaegar was [Jon’s] dad,” but he doesn’t think to explore it further. When Samwell Tarly says that [Rhaegar and Lyanna] were married, he can then confirm it. When his sisters come to him offscreen and go, “Can you look up what is the real deal with Littlefinger?” He can go, “He said this and this and this.”
So going into the final season, fans shouldn’t assume that Bran is literally all-knowing. “Bran hasn’t had time to come to complete terms with his powers — he just has them now,” Wright clarified. “He’s not going to be mistake-free. He’s not completely infallible. That’s definitely true.”
At the same time, I think Bran will stick up for what is right and look up the right things at the right time. While Bran can’t necessarily look up the future, he has an idea of fate and destiny. How he played it when he first looked at [Littlefinger’s] knife and gave it to Arya … Bran can see that this knife has some kind of importance in Arya’s hands. He looked up all the connections and he can see that this knife has some kind of timeline that links to someone. In my mind, that’s why Bran was giving it to Arya like that. He knows the general arc and shape of how things have to go. I don’t think Bran would have let Sansa kill Arya had it come to that. [Pauses.] I hope not.
Talking about Bran’s journey more generally, Wright reiterated that this version of the character was, at the behest of showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, inspired by the all-seeing Doctor Manhatten from the Watchmen comic, an “emotionless rock connecting these different timelines and the history of the universe.” Nonetheless, the team still wanted “a bit of Bran” left in there. “It’s like he’s the first cyborg. We just connected a supercomputer to a human being’s brain. He’s a mainframe, but there’s a little bit of his personality. More often than not, though, Bran is a vessel for human knowledge.”
Another possibility: possessing Hodor back in season 6 “fried Bran’s brain.” Whatever happened exactly, all we know now is that Bran doesn’t have as many worldly attachments as he used to.
While Bran is still grateful for the help of Meera and Hodor, he just sees it as like a math equation on a page. He’s like, “We have to take away that from that so we could get to that, and we needed that to get to there.” He’s looking at everything in a more calculated way now. He’s like a very, very powerful computer or calculator. There is a sense of some kind of personality or some vague flicker of emotion, but more than anything, Bran is just looking at this spreadsheet of equations and things that need to happen. In many ways, I don’t think Hodor and Meera are in his mind at all. He’s so dead set on what has to happen to next.
So in a way, he really did “die in that cave,” as Meera lamented before leaving Winterfell.
Finally, Wright addressed the weirdly popular theory that Bran Stark and the Night King are not actually enemies but are, in fact, the same person. “I think it’s less that they’re the same person and more that they’re two of the ancient beings of Westeros,” Wright said.
The Three-Eyed Raven has been around for God knows how long, and White Walkers have been reported since the beginning of time. As we’ve seen, they were created by the Children of the Forest, so we can’t get much more ancient than that. Perhaps we can think of it as these are two characters with a huge amount of power, but one is a Frankenstein’s monster who is driven by nothing but hatred and violence. Then there’s Bran, who uses his powers for good. I want to find out why the Night King is so obsessed with destroying mankind. We’ll see whether they have any kind of explanations in the next season. Hopefully we’ll find out cool stuff about both of those characters.
Hopefully.
To stay up to date on everything Game of Thrones, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Watch Game of Thrones for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels.
