‘Game of Thrones’ Creator George RR Martin on the One Change He Hates

In ten days, we’ll know how Game of Thrones ends, but it will still be years before we learn how George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series concludes. Even as HBO gears up to bid goodbye to Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, and Arya Stark, hardcore fans won’t be satisfied until we know what Martin’s ending is. We know it will be “bittersweet,” but how different will it be? Martin recently told 60 Minutes that “the series has been extremely faithful compared to 97% of all television and movie adaptations of literary properties, but it’s not completely faithful.” So what’s the big difference? According to an interview with Fast Company, it might just be the emphasis given on certain popular supporting characters over Martin’s main cast.

https://twitter.com/FastCompany/status/1124354179479343105/

The Fast Company mini-interview is tucked in the midst of a recent media avalanche for the Game of Thrones author and it’s all about how he likes to be “captain” of a creative endeavor. Martin explains that it can be exciting working on an adaptation of his work because it can put you in contact with some brilliant folks.

“It can also be traumatic because sometimes their creative vision and your creative vision don’t match and you get the famous ‘creative differences’ thing which leads to a lot of conflict,” Martin says. “It’s hard enough to come up with a good story and good characters and things like that, but in television and film, not only does the writer have to come up with that, but then he has to fight for it, politically. In some cases, you’re very lucky, and your team’s good people and you all have the same vision and you’re all on the same page. In some cases, no, there’s butting heads and there’s clashing egos, and there’s debates.”

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Martin specifically complains about the input showrunners and writers get from higher ups…as it pertains to supporting characters.

“You get totally extraneous things like the studio or the network weighing in and they have some particular thing that really has nothing to do with story, but as it relates to…’Well, this character has a very high Q rating so let’s give him a lot more stuff to do,'” he says. “He’s a rather unimportant character but the actor takes off, and you have to deal with stuff like that.”

Before you jump to conclusions and think this is a veiled dig at Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) killing the Night King, Fast Company seems to have outed a particular character on Game of Thrones as the one in question. As Martin talks about Q ratings and a “rather unimportant character,” the clip presents three back-to-back Bronn (Jerome Flynn) scenes. A few of them place the actor in Dorne with Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) — something that has not happened in the books yet and may never happen at all.

Overall, though, Martin seems confident that Game of Thrones won’t end too different than his own books.

“I don’t think Dan [Weiss] and Dave [Benioff]’s ending is going to be that different from my ending because of the conversations we did have, but they may be on certain secondary characters,” Martin said in the aforementioned 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper.

Let’s see if that’s what Martin says after the finale actually airs.

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