- Vladimir Furdik, the actor who plays the Night King on Game of Thrones, revealed that his character has a “target he wants to kill” in Season 8.
- The White Walker leader will also reanimate corpses like he did after the Massacre of Hardhome in Season 5, but it will be “even stronger” this time around, Furdik teased.
- The actor thinks the Night King’s motive is revenge.
The Night King has his icy blue eyes on a certain someone in Game of Thrones‘ eighth and final season. Slovak actor Vladimir Furdik, who plays the silent but menacing leader of the White Walkers, teased the villain’s intent for the series’ final episodes, and it doesn’t look so great for the people of Westeros.
“People will see he has a target he wants to kill, and you will find out who that is,” Furdik told Entertainment Weekly of his character’s Season 8 storyline. But who is that target exactly? Jon Snow? Daenerys Targaryen? The Three-Eyed Raven, AKA Bran Stark? The answer remains unclear.
Furdik did, however, tease that his character will have a big moment of reanimating corpses, much like he did in “Hardhome,” with the epic White Walker face-off in Season 5.
“There’s also that moment [in ‘Hardhome’] when Jon Snow was on the boat and the Night King looked at him and raised his arms — there’s a similar and even stronger moment between Jon and the Night King this time,” Furdik said. (Interestingly enough, the actor also played the first White Walker Jon killed in that episode.)
If the epic battle between the living and the dead will take place at Winterfell this season, as Entertainment Weekly reports, what corpses will the Night King be adding to his Army of the Dead? We wonder if those buried in the Winterfell crypts will be next.
But what does the White Walkers’ head honcho want anyway? What’s his goal behind all of the violence?
“I think he wants revenge,” Furdik explained to EW. “Everybody in this story has two sides—a bad side and a good side. The Night King only has one side, a bad side.”
Furdik also reminded us that the Night King was human before he became an icy villain. “Somebody made him the Night King,” he said. “Nobody knows who he was before—a soldier or part of [nobility]. He never wanted to be the Night King.”
In Season 6, we saw a glimpse of this resistance when the White Walkers were first created by the Children of the Forest, who intended to use the cold creatures as protection from the First Men (or humankind). The scene showed a man in severe pain, gagged and tied to a tree, as one of the Children pierced his chest with a shard of dragonglass until he began to transform.
We’ll finally find out the Night King’s plan when Game of Thrones returns on April 14.
Watch the official trailer for Game of Thrones Season 8 below.
