HBODid you suddenly break out into a heaving sob when your coworker asked you to "Hold the door!" as the elevator shut? That's a normal reaction if you watched Game of Thrones' "The Door."
The Sunday, May 22 episode, episode five of season six, told the tragic origin story and death of Hodor (Kristian Nairn) as he saved Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) from the White Walkers. You've seen the episode, you know tragic is exactly the right term to describe what happened, how "hold the door" became "Hodor."
"I had tears in my eyes. I don't see myself on screen, I see Hodor. I always talk about him in the third person," Nairn told EW. "I just saw the character die and it was very sad. I think people are going to a) freak out, b) be very sad."
Nairn said he loved how Hodor went out…but did he go out?
"I couldn't be happier how he has gone out. The interesting thing is it's kinda left open. You don't actually see him [die]. It's implied. So who knows? He may come back as a White Walker, maybe he got away," he said. "But it's a really good way to do it. I couldn't have asked for a better goodbye to a character I love. My favorite part is it ties up the question of why is Hodor ‘Hodor.' Why does he say the word ‘Hodor'? Only George R.R. Martin or David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] could have come up with this. It's incredibly sad. The minute you finally learn something about Hodor, they kill him!"
In the video above, Nairn said it was a difficult scene to read because he loves "the character to death."
"I like that he sacrificed himself for his friends. It feels very true to Hodor to me," he said.
Executive producer Benioff told EW the call to Nairn about Hodor's death was more difficult than the others—and that's saying something. They've made a lot of death calls to cast members on the HBO fantasy drama.
Hodor and Bran took a season off before returning for season six, making the death all the more sad.
"It's mortifying, it's so sad," Hempstead-Wright said in the video above. "He's one of the only characters in Game of Thrones who genuinely doesn't have an agenda of any kind. At all. He's just Hodor…so to have him then killed is just the ultimate twisting of the knife. It really is these good, kind characters, who deserve nothing like that and have been through a horrible time themselves because Hodor as we know was just a totally normal kid who was then sort of screwed over by Bran."