No One Was More Surprised By Bran’s ‘Game Of Thrones’ Finale Moments Than Isaac Hempstead Wright

Warning: Game of Thrones spoilers will be found below.

Game of Thrones ended in several unexpected ways, but it’s fair to say that the issue that mattered most landed as the biggest shocker of all. Nope, we’re not talking about when Jon Snow stabbed Daenerys in the heart or the fact that Drogon melted the Iron Throne, but instead, the person who won the right to sit on a now-metaphorical throne. That would be Bran Stark, a.k.a., the Three-eyed Raven, who’s now formally known as Bran the Broken. He shall rule the Seven Six Kingdoms and has probably known his fate for quite some time, but viewers were certainly taken aback by his ascent.

Rest assured that the actor who plays Bran, Isaac Hempstead Wright, also didn’t believe what was happening when he read his script for the final episode. He thought it was an elaborate joke, as he told Entertainment Weekly:

“When I got to the [Dragonpit scene] in the last episode and they’re like, ‘What about Bran’ I had to get up and pace around the room,” he recalls. “I genuinely thought it was a joke script and that [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] sent to everyone a script with their own character ends up on the Iron Throne. ‘Yeah, good one guys. Oh sh*t, it’s actually real'”

Hempstead-Wright continued to express that he was mostly “happy” with the outcome, although he found it slightly sad that Bran didn’t die, so he could “get in one good death scene with an exploding head or something.” Can you imagine As absurd as it sounds, that outcome for Bran the Broken wouldn’t have seemed as far out of left field as seeing him rule (most of) Westeros. All that warging can’t be good for the noggin, and exploding was bound to happen at some point if it continued, but it seems that Bran’s warging days are over. As is the long, arduous wait for how Game of Thrones ended.