The Game of Thrones Strategy to Avoid Final Season Spoilers Is Even Crazier Than We Thought.
Earlier this fall a rumor about the final season of Game of Thrones started spreading through the fandom. No, this wasn’t another behind-the-scenes spoiler or tantalizing bit of casting news. The source of this rumor came from HBO president Casey Bloys himself who said that in order to preserve the surprise of the Season 8 series finale and prevent the whole Kit and caboodle from leaking online, the show will film multiple alternate endings to George R.R. Martin’s saga. But according to a new interview with star Emilia Clarke, precautions are going even further than that. Not even the actors, she says, will know how it all will end.
Now, there was reason enough to doubt this multiple endings story from Bloys in the first place. Putting aside the fact that HBO, Game of Thrones, and its stars have a habit of fudging the truth in order to, as they see it, protect the fandom from knowing too much about the story, there are a few other doubtful elements at play here. Financially, shooting several entirely different endings for a big-budget fantasy of this scope seems extreme. Sure, there is precedent for HBO spending some extra time and money to dupe inquisitive fans. Thrones star Kit Harington claimed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that the show once spent 15 hours shooting three fake scenes in order to foil the drone-heavy spies circling the production. But while shots of Emilia Clarke and Harington monkeying around with some foam dragon heads on the beach may have fooled some fans, it didn’t hoodwink the most devoted Thrones production reporters. Susan Miller, of the fan site Watchers on the Wall, pointed out to Vulture that her team wasn’t taken in for a second.
So given that those relatively inexpensive gambits didn’t fool spoiler hunters last year and the spoilers that did leak out didn’t impact either ratings or the enthusiasm of the Thrones fan base (the show was more popular than ever), then what is the value of actually shooting multiple costly endings? On the other hand, claiming you’re shooting multiple endings, does have its advantages. Clarke told The Telegraph that showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have “written a number of different endings” and that “none of the cast know what the actual ending is. If there’s ever a leak of any kind, don’t believe it because it’s probably not true.” In other words, just by saying this, Clarke has empowered the cast and crew to cry “fake news” at whatever leaks there may be.
But the notion that not even the cast knows how it all will end is even a little harder to believe. Weiss and Benioff told Vanity Fair way back in 2014 that George R.R. Martin had let them in on how A Song of Ice and Fire would all wrap up. Even as the HBO show shot past Martin’s novels, Weiss and Benioff wrote their version of the story with that ending mind. Benioff said:
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