Jaime Lannister filled fans hearts with joy early in Game of Thrones season 8 when he knighted Brienne of Tarth, and then later when the two finally got together. “I was shocked,” Coster-Waldau told Entertainment Weekly. “I never thought it was going to happen. They survived. There’s this party. They buried the dead. There’s this enormous relief. We did it.”
“It was really weird,” he said of the love scene. “It was awkward. I was trying to laugh and Gwendoline was like, ‘Don’t f—ing laugh!’” I assume he meant “trying not to laugh.” We may never know.
But of course, it wasn’t to last. “It would have been wonderful if he could have made it. And him and Brienne could have had a life together,” Coster-Waldau said. “But he says it himself when he’s leaving Brienne. She says, ‘You shouldn’t do this.’ He says, ‘Have you ever walked away from a fight? I have to do this.’”
The things you do for love… you have to. He is stopped at one point, when he’s captured. You might say: “Tyrion, what are you doing?” Tyrion could have saved his brother by not [setting him free]. But it would have killed Jaime not to go — in a different way, of course.
A lot of fans were surely hoping that Jaime would choose life, would choose Brienne, would choose to break free of his unhealthy bond to his sister, but the pull of a lifetime of learned behavior proved too strong. It was, as Coster-Waldau says, heartbreaking. “The hardest thing is the fact they actually find the balance because he ends up with Brienne for a brief moment. He kinda knows himself there is no alternative.”
For a moment he tricks himself into thinking there is an alternative to his life. As an audience you want him to succeed in taking that different route. You wonder if he’s changed and if he’s escaped this destructive relationship. But you realize he’s so bound by this code of honor of family first, and him and Cersei have a strong bond on every level him. He didn’t say, “Cersei, I don’t love you anymore.” He said, “I’m going to fight for the living because ultimately that’s the only way you and the child you carry can live.” He has to go back. She’s all alone. He’s the last one she has. He knows he has to back and try to save her.
I know fans are up in arms about a bunch of choices in the final season, but as painful as it was to see Jaime fail to embrace his better self, it was a choice I bought. Not everyone can break away. Coster-Waldau compared the end of Jaime’s journey to the end of the Hound’s. “Both bound by family.”
I thought it was a great ending for that couple. She was never going to surrender. And he says it to Bronn in season 4. Bronn asked, “How would you want it to end?” And Jaime says, “In the arms of the woman I love.” So this was foreshadowed and that’s what happened. There’s a least a moment that they do connect: “Just look at me, just look in my eyes, it’s just you and me…”
Meanwhile, Coster-Waldau took to Instagram to thank the fans for watching, give his take on the ending, and pitch his idea for a Game of Thrones sequel series:
Solid whistling ability there.
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