Game of Thrones season 8 isn’t messing around. Remember Battle of the Bastards, the heart-stopping season 6 episode that saw said bastards Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton duke it out in a pile of mud, blood, and bodies? Take that, and treble it. Even then, it might not get close to the big battle waiting for us in Thrones’ final season, with it even being described as the biggest action sequence in movie and TV history.
“It’s brutal. It makes Battle of the Bastards look like a theme park,” Peter Dinklage, the actor who plays Tyrion Lannister, tells EW for its blowout cover story. He’s not far wrong; the numbers are obscene: 55 days worth of night shoots, weeks of interior shooting, building an entire expansion to Winterfell, and much more. By comparison, Battle of the Bastards took only 25 days. In a field.
EW reveals that – and this a pretty big, if obvious, spoiler – the battle will revolve around major characters facing off against the Army of the Dead and the Night King. It’s even described as “the most sustained action sequence ever made for television and film.” It all sounds like it’s building to a crescendo worthy of ending one of the biggest TV shows of all time.
It’s a little wonder, then, that co-showrunner David Benioff has probably been mulling this over for some time, revealing: “We’ve been building toward this since the very beginning, it’s the living against the dead, and you can’t do that in a 12-minute sequence.” Forget going back or going home, Thrones is doing both; having its cake, eating it, and probably blowing it up in the process.
We're getting ever closer to the Game of Thrones ending - so let's find out what the cast have had to say about it.
