Olé! In today’s Game of Thrones roundup: David Benioff and D.B. Weiss get our hopes up about the finale. Poor, poor Kit Harington. What George R.R. Martin wishes were different about the show. Pedro Pascal snags a new TV gig. And Oberyn Martell, feminist.
Behind the cut you’ll find spoilers for all aired episodes of Game of Thrones, but none for the finale or beyond.
When season four finale “The Children” airs this Sunday, Game of Thrones showrunners Benioff and Weiss promise that we’ll be watching the “best finale we’ve ever done, bar none… The performances from our cast, the direction from Alex Graves, the VFX work, the new [music] cues from Ramin Djawadi – all of it came together in perhaps the finest hour we’ve produced.” Strong words, and we’ll just have to wait and see whether we think they’re true or not.
One person who won’t be making the finale all that it can be, of course, is Oberyn Martell, whose death in episode eight we will never, ever be over, thank you very much. Since that head- and soul-crushing scene, actor Pedro Pascal spoke up to Access Hollywood about just what made Oberyn so great in the first place:
I fell in love with the character and maybe that helped me play him. The first thing that helped me identify with him was actually a love for him. I found him very delicious. I also found him very, very honorable and very progressive and just an all-around badass, not because he’s a great fighter and because he likes to f*** everything that moves, but because he has morals that I identify with. So it was always very hard for me to kind of like, detach myself from my own heartbreak that the character goes out the way that he goes out.
Who brought these onions in here?!
And in another interview: Oberyn Martell, Actual Feminist.
HBO: Would you say that Oberyn is a feminist?
Pedro Pascal: Absolutely. Without choosing to be. It’s just intrinsic and logical to him. Ellaria Sand is the love of his life because she is his equal, if not his superior, in certain ways. That’s part of what makes him such a fierce man because he knows who to take his lead from.
That whole interview is worth reading, because he talks about Oberyn’s emotional intelligence and how he raises his daughters, but also because he says his sword name of choice is “Sammy the Sand Snake.” Miss you, bro. We’ll be able to see Pascal again in the Netflix series Narcos, “the true-life story of the growth and spread of cocaine drug cartels across the globe and attendant efforts of law enforcement to meet them head on in brutal, bloody conflict.” Pascal will play Javier Pena, a Mexican DEA agent. It premieres next year, but there’s still be plenty of time for him to play Dr. Strange if Marvel wants him to… right? Please?
Going back to Game of Thrones, the New York Times has a feature on George RR Martin where they ask him what he would change about the show. His answer is what a lot of Game of Thrones fans would say (no, not less sexual violence): He wants it to be longer. “I’d love to have 13 episodes,” per season, he says. “With 13 episodes, we could include smaller scenes that we had to cut, scenes that make the story deeper and richer.” One of the scenes he highlights is an argument between Sansa and Arya in the first book, when Sansa wants to hang with Cersei and Arya just wants to tomboy it up with Mycah the butcher boy: “Mr. Martin said he misses the scene because it adds texture and helps establish early on the characters of and relationship between the sisters.”
And to wrap up this roundup, Kit Harington knows nothing, including the fact that HBO won’t let him cut his hair. Via The Hollywood Reporter:
“I didn’t realize this until recently and then I kind of, I wanted to cut it — I’ve had long hair for ages — and they were like, ‘No, no, no, that won’t be happening.’” The requirement has since led to “ridiculous conversations … between agents and managers and HBO,” Harington said. “Can we have four inches off or can we have an inch off? What can we do with this? How curly should it be?” the actor said, indicated some of the issues being assessed. “It gets silly.”
Well I think Jon Snow should have a fauxhawk.
(via Digital Spy, Deadline, Pajiba)
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