Editor’s note: There are spoilers about the Battle of Winterfell ahead.
About a month after filming wrapped on Game of Thrones in July 2018, John Bradley and Kit Harington sat down for dinner together in London. On screen, their characters, Samwell Tarly and Jon Snow, built a powerful bond over eight seasons that has helped them both survive the heedless brutality of Westeros. In the real world, a similar friendship helped them through the pressures of going from nobodies to household names in the biggest TV phenomenon of the century.
Tyler Joe
At this dinner, the friends and co-stars found themselves in a completely different world than the one they’d known for the better part of a decade. The filming of Game of Thrones was over. Now they were simply friends, who’d gone through something crazy and incredible together. They needed to figure out who they were next.
“We started talking to each other about the nature of our friendship over the course of eight years. And just thinking, you know, it’s a good job that we’ve been friends because we work so closely with each other. If we didn’t get on, it would have been a nightmare to just see the face every day that you dislike,” Bradley tells me on the afternoon before the Game of Thrones Season Eight premiere at Radio City Music Hall. (He took a car two blocks—from his hotel to the suite in Midtown Manhattan where we meet to chat—because fans had been camping outside of their building all week.)
As is the case with any job, once it’s over there’s no reason for co-workers to see each other anymore—unless, of course, they’re friends outside the office. “We were just talking about now that the show’s ended we don’t have a real structure to our seeing each other anymore,” he says. “Now it’s a real test of all of those friendships.”
That friendship was even a punchline on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, when Bradley asks Harington—who was hosting that week—whether they’d still be friends after the show. According to Bradley, he didn’t even know he’d be on SNL until that Thursday, and in those final moments before the show went live, he said, “I wouldn’t swap places with [Harington] for anything in the world. It’s just a daunting job.”
When Bradley walked onto the set of Game of Thrones in its first season, neither he nor Harington had ever acted in front of a camera. They were in their early twenties and Bradley had just gotten out of the Manchester School of Theatre a few months prior. Game of Thrones wasn’t just his first acting gig—it was his first audition. Bradley and Kit were in it together.
“Over the course of that first season, Kit and I really bonded over that, because we were able to work out that the other one was just as inexperienced as they were,” Bradley tells me. “I think that kinda set the tone for the rest of our friendship. The friends that you make when you are scared and uncertain and vulnerable, they’re the friends that you stick with, because you know that you can trust them and they know what’s going on under the surface.” Much like their characters on screen, Bradley and Kit were thrust into roles for which they weren’t fully prepared and had to learn on the job, while under enormous scrutiny.
I spoke with Bradley last month as he prepared for the Season Eight premiere in New York, and checked in with him again in the hours before Episode Three, the Battle of Winterfell aired. We talked in detail about the massive episode and Samwell Tarly’s part in the battle, how his character represents a different type of masculinity in fantasy, and how Game of Thrones‘ ending is as satisfying as the Red Wedding. If you’re not caught up on the show, there will be spoilers ahead.
In the fourth episode of Season One, Jon Snow is helping train new recruits who have taken the black of the Night’s Watch. In walks Samwell Tarly. He’s out of breath, his armor barely fits, he looks uncomfortable and slightly ill fitting. This guy’s not going to last long, the audience thinks as Samwell’s new Night’s Watch brothers mock his appearance. Then Samwell promptly gets his ass kicked. “I yield,” he yells from the ground as recruits beat him.
“Enough,” Jon says and jumps in to defend poor Tarly. There’s a deeper layer to the drama now, knowing the anxiety Bradley was experiencing on set.
Few people expected Samwell to make it to the end of that season, let alone to the final six episodes—least of all Bradley. That’s because in a world like Westeros, and in traditional fantasy, survival isn’t really expected from a character like Samwell. Heroism is often reserved for the physically strong, or a protagonist gifted with some otherwise fantastical talent.
Not Sam, though. Sam just likes to read, which—Bradley points out—is more of a rare talent in Westeros than being strong.
“I just want people to see that there are different ways of doing things. A lot of those archetypes, especially in the current kind of political climate, a lot of those kinda toxic masculine archetypes are being ironed out,” Bradley says.
In the real world, it feels like there are more Stannis Baratheons—ruthless, entitled, power hungry—these days than Samwell Tarlys. I tell Bradley that Kit has often compared Joffrey, another horrifying example of toxic masculinity, to President Donald Trump.
“That is interesting because there’s a certain kind of weakness inherent in them both and I think there are a lot of similarities there,” Bradley says. “The thing about Trump and Joffrey is they should be the most powerful person there is, but they’re not. And they know that they’re not. And they’re worried about it. And when Joffrey says, ‘I am your king,’ and when Trump comes out with all of his bluster about, ‘I’ve achieved this and I’m the best this, and you’ve never seen anything like me before,’ you do get the sense that that’s coming out the mouths of people who are questioning their own power actually. And they’re worried that they’re actually not as powerful as they should be.”
These nuanced power dynamics are exactly what helps elevate Game of Thrones beyond typical popcorn genre fiction. For a show that’s often pigeonholed as being about boobs and dragons, it operates on a deeper level to challenge our preconceptions about the world in which we actually inhabit—as good fiction does.
That’s exactly what makes Samwell Tarly such a beloved and pivotal character in this franchise. While Jon survived—and in one case did not survive—on talent and skill and a bit of Red Priestess magic, Samwell has made it this far because he’s smart. It’s a good thing, too, because as we saw at the end of Season Seven and the beginning of Season Eight, Samwell Tarly has been responsible for two of the biggest reveals of this season: when he figures out Jon Snow’s true parentage and when he delivers this news to Jon in the first episode of Season Eight.
But that’s not all he’s done. As Sam explains on the eve of the Battle for Winterfell, “Everyone seems to forget that I was the first man to kill a White Walker.” He also survived the Fist of the First Men, fought the undead, protected Gilly—Sam is more than capable at handling his own in Season Eight.
And Bradley built that same confidence in himself as an actor and performer as he grew with Tarly over the course of eight seasons.
“I didn’t know how pivotal he was gonna become and I think that’s a good thing, because it’s a three-way kind of attack of surprise: the audience discovers how brave and worthwhile this character is over the course of the next eight seasons; I discovered it as an actor just how much this character is growing; and the character discovers it about himself,” Bradley explains.
Just in general storytelling terms, Bradley is pivotal. Every character can’t be Jon Snow, he notes. “You need a character like Sam to represent the man on the street, because then that contextualizes all of the threats and all of the stakes,” Bradley says. “You need a Sam for Jon Snow to make sense. In order for Jon Snow to appear above and beyond the regular guy, you need to see the regular guy. And as much as a lot of men don’t like to admit it… Sam’s coping with it is probably how they cope with it.”
Bradley continues: “A lot of men probably want to think on some level that all men are like Jon Snow. They wanna think that a man is a man and a man will stand up for what he does. And a man will come out of the traps and do the job, but that’s not like most men that I know. Most men that I know are vulnerable a lot of the time and scared and some people don’t like to see that represented because it takes away from their fantasy of what they are and what a man should be.”
Sam, on the other hand, is a pacifist, according to Bradley, who notes that while Game of Thrones is known for its hyper violence, George R.R. Martin was a conscious objector to the Vietnam War. I point out that Martin has often considered Samwell the in-book version of himself, and ask if he’s ever talked to the author about it.
“I’ve not really had a conversation with him about it, no. I wouldn’t want to because I wouldn’t necessarily want it to be confirmed,” Bradley says. “I think it’s something to always strive for. I think you could kind of get crushed under the weight of it if you imagined if you are playing the part of this author, his avatar in the show.”
Going into the third episode of Season Eight, Samwell Tarly has earned his right to stand beside Jon Snow at the battle of Winterfell. It’s the episode that has long been hailed as one of the longest consecutive battle sequences ever put on film. And the cast has built the hype throughout the last few months by recounting the grueling filming schedule it required. That included Tarly, who refused to stay in the presumed safety of the crypts.
“He wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if Jon or anyone else died while he was safe in the crypts,” Bradley tells me.
In fact, given what happens in the crypts in Episode Two, Bradley tells me that Sam would probably have rather been there protecting Gilly and Little Sam, rather than fighting on the front lines.
The climactic battle of Winterfell fittingly opens with Sam’s trembling hands, as he walks outside in a stunning tracking shot and see’s the women and children walking into the crypts and finds himself at a crossroads, according to Bradley.
“In that moment he decides that these are the people he’s fighting for,” Bradley says. “He decides to fight for his own sense of duty. I think that’s a really powerful moment.”
Samwell’s role in the episode made for a grueling shoot (for him and everyone else involved). “When you’re doing 60 night shoots and you’re going to bed at 6 am and waking up at two in the afternoon and going to work again, you feel that your entire body’s been affected on a molecular level because you’re completely separated from your real life,” Bradley said. “When you’re up and socializing, your friends are all in bed and the other way around. When your friends are up, you’re in bed. So you find yourself being completely cut off from reality.”
In the heat of the battle, Samwell finds himself fighting alongside characters he’s never interacted with on the show. Most notably, near the end of Episode Three, Sam has fought, killed, and survived this battle, this war, this show, but he’s reached his breaking point. He’s lying on a pile of bodies of people he’s known. He feels guilt and sadness for the people who have died, including Dolorous Edd—who died earlier in the episode saving Sam—and he’s lost the will to fight.
“He’s emotionally exhausted, he’s physically exhausted,” Bradley tells me. “He looks like the last of his fight has left him.”
In filming that scene, Bradley says he got a note from the episode’s director Miguel Sapochnik that he’ll never forget.
“He said, ‘it’s just going to be you and a stack of bodies, and I want you to get across in this shot that this is Sam thinking for the first time in this battle that he’s not going to survive this. This is the moment where all the fight goes out of your character,'” Bradley remembers.
“That was a really tough moment to film. We had been filming for a long time and we felt like it had really been starting to take its toll on us. We felt battle scared,” Bradley says. “I was leaning against bodies of people who presumably Sam had known. They were just stuffed dummies, but it was really an eerie moment, because you’re looking at dead human faces and hands, and it can have a visceral effect on you. It felt when I was filming that moment that it might be the most memorable moment in my entire time on this show.”
Of course, Greyworm, at the last second, saves Sam. And the moment speaks to the character as a whole, one who has been the most human among the heroes and the villains. “That was one of those human moments in the middle of this battle. You can do action all day, but you have to find these moments of humanity in the middle of that.”
Bradley didn’t think he’d survive this climactic battle, even though he knows Samwell still has so much more to offer this story. “For Sam, I knew how much potential he has to effect the outcome of this show, but I genuinely thought they were going to kill him halfway through the last season,” Bradley tells me.
The Battle of Winterfell isn’t the end for Samwell Tarly. He makes it through, and finds himself among the living, filled with grief for all his friends and brothers who fell during the fight. But you can expect the series to end in the most Game of Thrones way possible, as Bradley ominously compares it to the infamous Red Wedding slaughter.
“One word that I always use to describe how people feel about the show is satisfying. Happiness isn’t something that this show goes about too well, because they’ve never bothered about keeping an audience happy. So when people say, ‘Am I gonna be happy with the ending?’ It’s like, well, maybe not. Because everybody’s got a different way that it wants to end,” Bradley says. “The Red Wedding is a hugely satisfying, dramatic moment, but you don’t want it to happen. And I think that with Sam, I’m happy with the ending, but mainly because I’m just satisfied with it.”
As Bradley reminds me, George R.R. Martin’s famous quote is: “There are no happy endings.”
It was after filming that satisfying ending that Bradley found himself at dinner with Harington for the first time since knowing each other as just friends rather than co-stars.
And that was a defining moment for them and their friendship—it was a chance to see if it could stick beyond the show that brought them together in the first place. “I think everything that we liked and everything that we shared and talked about, or the vast majority, was nothing really to do with the show,” Bradley tells me. They bonded over their favorite football team (Manchester United) and their favorite comedian (Alan Partridge) rather than dragons and swords.
“If the thing that you miss the most about Game of Thrones was the costume, you’re fucked because you’re never gonna wear the costume again. You’re never gonna play the character again. That bit of your life is gone completely,” Bradley says. “But as long as it’s the people that you miss most, then that’s the thing that you can have for the rest of your life if you choose to sustain it.”
So, with those friendships intact, Bradley can move on to whatever comes after Thrones. For now, he doesn’t have much interest in the idea of being a celebrity. He has a few film projects in the works, but, for the most part, wants to take things slow and give himself some time after the life-changing event of Game of Thrones.
He’ll still have people approaching him in public, and he’ll still be Sam Tarly to millions of fans, but he’ll also have the friends he made through the dirt, snow, and blood of Westeros.
