HBOWinter is here, and we are so not prepared.
Game of Thrones returns this weekend, and with only six episodes left, it's alarmingly close to ending forever. That prospect is made all the more alarming by some of the things the cast has said about the end of the show, calling it "polarizing" and guessing that a lot of fans will not like the finale.
Considering everything we know about this show and everything we've heard, this show will not go quietly. Everybody's probably going to die, and they're not gonna do it peacefully. We're in for some serious heartbreak, likely right when all our favorite characters are on the cusp of a happy ending. In fact, it feels like perhaps no one will get a happy ending at all, and we wouldn't be shocked if the show ends with not a single main character left alive.
All that we know for sure right now is that this cast can't wait to be able to actually talk about the show they're on, and we'll be waiting very patiently to hear about what it was really like to end this show once we've seen that ending for ourselves.
Until then, we'll just panic over the quotes below.
"It was really satisfying for us. Who knows if it will be satisfying for the fans? I think a lot of fans will be disappointed and a lot of fans will be over the moon," Sophie Turner told IGN. "I think it will be really interesting to see people's reactions..."
"I think not everyone's going to be happy, you know, and you can't please everyone," Kit Harington told MTV News. My favorite TV shows are Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Wire, and they all ended in a way that...it's never going to satisfy you."
"I feel very, very—I'm trying to find the right word. I think he was given a very good conclusion. No matter what that is—death can be a great way out," Peter Dinklage told Vulture.
"I had all these ideas in my head and a version of one of them is how it ends up," Peter Dinklage told EW. "David and Dan have a brilliant version of what I had. If I use any adjectives it will give it away, but I love how it ended up, and how it ends up for everybody. They had a beautiful gentle touch with some and a hard touch with others. We're so used to the standard formula of bad guys dying and good guys living...What David and Dan have done with all this is beautiful, painful, and lovely. It takes the show somewhere that's dangerous and contemporary with what's going on in the world."
"I ended on the perfect scene. I was alone—shocker! Arya's always bloody alone," Maisie Williams told The Guardian. "But I was alone and I had watched a lot of other people wrap. I knew the drill, I had seen the tears and heard the speeches."
"I got to the end and I didn't want more," she continued. "I had exhausted every possible piece of Arya. And this season was quite big for me. I had a lot more to do."
"It f--ked me up," Emilia Clarke told Vanity Fair of filming her Dany's final moments on the show. "Knowing that is going to be a lasting flavor in someone's mouth of what Daenerys is..."
"It's going to be huge, that much everyone needs to know," Emilia Clarke told E! News. "It took us a long time to film this one for a very good reason. But I think there's going to be some things...I know there's going to be some things in this last season that will shock people."
"I think if it hadn't been the last season, people would've just collapsed," Nikolaj Coster-Waldau told HuffPost. "We wouldn't have made it. I mean, at one point, the crew had 52 nights in one go in Northern Ireland. Just unheard of."
"It's either going to be everything that everyone dreamed of or it's going to be disappointing," Maisie Williams told Radio Times. "It depends what side of the fence you sit on because there's definitely going to be that divide. It depends what people want from the final season. I love it, but you never know."
"Everyone was broken at the end. I don't know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending or if we were crying because it was so f--king tiring. We were sleep deprived. It was like it was designed to make you think, Right, I'm f--king sick of this," Kit Harington told GQ Australia. "I remember everyone walking around towards the end going, ‘I've had enough now. I love this, it's been the best thing in my life, I'll miss it one day – but I'm done.'"
It's Game of Thrones, so it's going to be bloodier and more death and more emotionally torturous than all the years before," Sophie Turner told Gold Derby.
"No matter how you end it, people don't want it to end. So the ending is not going to be okay, because ‘the end' is not okay. You know what I mean? I think the way we end it is right. And I think it's time," Maisie Williams told EW, plus: "There's a lot of death this year."
"I was very shocked and surprised at certain events unfolding, and then I blubbed my eyes out. I cried," Kit Harington told Stephen Colbert of reading the final episode.
"I think ‘bittersweet' is actually really appropriate and really applicable. And I think it couldn't have ended any other way than bittersweet," Joe Dempsie told Men's Health. "I think [co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] realized long ago that you can't please everyone. I don't think they've ever tried to please everyone. There may be people that aren't too keen on the ending. But I really think that it's one that will stand the test of time. And I think even those who don't necessarily appreciate it when they watch it, I think television history will judge it really favorably."
Iain Glen had a truly terrible time filming the major battle against the Army of the Dead.
"It was the most unpleasant experience I've had on Thrones," he told EW. "A real test, really miserable. You get to sleep at seven in the morning and when you wake in the midday you're still so spent you can't really do anything, and then you're back. You have no life outside it. You have an absolute f—ked bunch of actors. But without getting too method [acting] about it, on screen it bleeds through to the reality of the Thrones world."
"It won't go the way some people want," Isaac Hempstead-Wright told THR. "It will be too happy for some people, or too sad, or too whatever. That's the nature of an ending… Nothing more is coming, and the certainty of it being over will definitely bother people."
"For me—without giving anything away, I guess—I was satisfied with how unpredictable the show's ending really is," Sophie Turner told Digital Spy. "People have come up with so many fan theories about how it's going to end, and who will end up where, and who will end up with who. It really is so unpredictable the way that it ends up. I'm very satisfied with that, and I think that the fans will be satisfied with that, too. Well, we hope. We'll see!"
"You're going to need therapy," Gwendoline Christie told E! News. "I think just the show ending is going to send all of the world into professional help."
"I think I got my final day changed about 18 times, to the point where I didn't know when it was. I was like, ‘Just don't tell me.' Then it came, and I had that final scene, which was very average," Kit Harington told InStyle. "I was just walking somewhere with Liam [Cunningham, who plays Davos Seaworth] and Jacob [Anderson, who plays Grey Worm]. It couldn't have been more of a wet fart of a scene."
Game of Thrones premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.