Maisie Williams unsuccessfully predicted who would survive the final season of ‘Game of Thrones’.
The 21-year-old actress – who plays assassin Arya Stark – sat down with her mum one evening before she received her scripts for the eighth and final series of the HBO fantasy drama to write down what they expected to happen in the last six episodes, but neither of them made the right calls.
she recalled: "I said, ‘Let’s predict the final series. You call who you think is going to be alive and who you think is going to be dead. So will I.’ And we did. And we were both wrong."
Her co-star, Joe Dempsie – who plays Gendry, the bastard son of the late King Robert Baratheon – admitted one of the first things he did on receiving his scripts was to check to see if he’d won, died or survived.
He admitted: "At the top of every script there is a cast list for every character involved in that episode. A few of us were tempted to check if we were in the last one."
And asked his fate, he simply said: "Look, Gendry’s the last surviving blood Baratheon. He’s got to have a pretty strong claim. But I don’t even trust the fact that I have the answers in my brain. It feels like you’re walking around with a secret that the whole world wants to know."
But Kit Harington, whose alter ego Jon Snow is one of the favourites to end up on the iron throne, didn’t look at his scripts until the full cast gathered for a read through, and he delighted them with his reactions.
Emilia Clarke, who plays his on-screen lover, Danerys Targeryen, told the Sunday Times magazine: "Kit hadn’t even looked at the scripts before the read-through.
"He didn’t want to know, so when we all read it out loud, all of us together probably for the first time since series three, Kit’s reactions were insane. He was just gawping."
The 32-year-old actor may have been gripped to the final scripts but he admitted he would have "sneered" at the idea of watching the show when it first began if he hadn’t been cast.
Kit said: "Had I not been in it, and someone had said, ‘Why don’t you watch that?’ I’d have said, ‘Dragons?’ I would have sneered at it."
Kit – who is married to former co-star Rose Leslie – is proud of the "skill" he has developed in talking about the show without giving away any spoilers.
He said: "It’s something I pride myself on. Exciting people about it but not telling them anything is a skill that we’ve all developed in the ‘Thrones’ cast."