Sophie Turner just put one of the world’s biggest mysteries to rest: the coffee cup gaffe of Game of Thrones season eight.
Don’t know what I’m talking about? Let’s back up for a second. If you watched this season of GoT, then you most likely remember how snoozy episode four was. To be fair, it had a lot to live up to, seeing as how it directly followed Arya Stark killing the Night King. All this dead air, though, probably explains why fans chose not to focus on the plot and instead on a rogue coffee cup that somehow made it into one of the scenes. Here it is to jog your memory:
And a few Twitter reactions to remind you of the sheer pandemonium it caused:
So how the hell did this happen? Game of Thrones is a detailed, big-budget production, so the fact such an obvious mistake made it into a final episode cut is head-scratching. At first Turner blamed the incident on Emilia Clarke, joking to Jimmy Fallon, “Look who it’s placed in front of. Emilia Clarke. She’s the culprit.”
But now Turner’s changing her tune. She now posits that Kit Harington is the one responsible for coffee cup-gate. “I hear this every day of my life. This coffee cup thing,” Turner told Conan O’Brien in a interview on Conan Thursday night, June 6. “It’s good to know the coffee cup got more press than the final season altogether. The coffee cup was where Kit’s chair was. At first I blamed it on Emilia, but I don’t think Emilia would do that. Kit is lazy, and I think he would’ve done that. It was in front of Kit’s chair and then, obviously, he moved so this picture was taken and it looked like it was in my seat. But I wasn’t there, either. It was Kit. It was 100 percent Kit.”
Last week we wrote about a Game of Thrones poster from season one that basically revealed the ending of the show hidden in plain sight. That secret spoiler made its way to Sophie Turner in a recent interview, and she was understandably shook that she didn’t catch it either.
In the promo image from about eight years ago, you can see Ned Stark brooding on the Iron Throne. The picture was resurfaced by Twitter user @thommybell, who noticed there’s a clue buried deep in the photo. If you look closely, you can see a raven sitting next to Ned—a dead giveaway that his son Bran Stark, a.k.a. The Three-Eyed Raven, ends up as the leader of the Seven Kingdoms. No one noticed the tiny detail, and most people were amazed once it was pointed out—including Turner.
While doing promo for her new movie Dark Phoenix,Metro U.K. asked Turner if there had been any foreshadowing that fans missed when it came to her character Sansa Stark’s storyline. Turner said the only hint was in the first episode, when Sansa tells her mother, “I want to be queen, Mommy, someday.” That’s when her Dark Phoenix costar Jessica Chastain pointed out the whole poster spoiler.
“You know the poster for the first season—you know what’s on it?” Chastain says in the video. “So it’s your papa on the throne, and there’s a raven on the throne, right to his right.”
Naturally, Turner’s reaction was absolutely priceless.
Turner has been answering tons of questions about Game of Thrones on this press junket. Just a few days ago, Sky News asked her if she ever saw herself reprising her role as Sansa. Her answer will break your heart, though it’s understandable in a way: “I think it’s time to say goodbye to Sansa,” she told the outlet.
“I’m ready-ish to say goodbye to her. I think my watch has ended. I just think it’s been 10 years of my life and the best 10 years of my life by far, and I finished in a very happy place with Sansa and it’s time to let her go.”
See her reaction to the season-one spoiler, below:
The final episode of Game of Thrones was controversial, but one plot line most people seemed to appreciate was (spoiler alert!) Sansa Stark—played by Sophie Turner—being crowned the Warden of the North. Because she’s one of the few characters whose story didn’t end in gut-wrenching tragedy, some have wondered if Sansa might make an appearance in one of the many spinoff shows GoT writer George RR Martin has said are in development. But that probably won’t happen. In a new interview with Sky News this week, Turner said she’s pretty much done with Sansa for now. As she put it, revisiting her character would “just be more trauma.”
“I think it’s time to say goodbye to Sansa,” Turner said, “I’m ready-ish to say goodbye to her, I think my watch has ended. I just think it’s been 10 years of my life and the best 10 years of my life by far, and I finished in a very happy place with Sansa and it’s time to let her go.”
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Sophie Turner started filming Game of Thrones when she was 14 years old, and the show has followed her into adulthood. She previously shared that the show caught her in a rough part of adolescence: She battled depression and frequently turned to her co-star and close friend, Maisie Williams, who played her sister Arya Stark. After the show ended, she took some time off to focus on her mental health.
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“I actually am still on my break,” she said. “I took a break off of work to focus on my mental health because I thought it was important.”
Turner commemorated the end of the show with an epic tattoo that showed a direwolf and the text, “The pack survives.” It seemed like a very final gesture, but who knows how things will change as the spinoffs take shape. So far, we only know about a prequel in the works, and it takes place thousands of years before Game of Thrones—so we definitely shouldn’t plan on seeing Sansa.
Sure, the Game of Thronesfinale was bleak, divisive, and full of plot holes, but hard-core fans are still missing the series pretty intensely. (It ran for nearly eight years, after all.) Luckily, for anyone who really needs to fill that Westeros-shaped void in their life, a onetime cruise is letting people take a spin through a piece of the Seven Kingdoms.
One of the main places that the show filmed was Croatia, and now a limited-time luxury cruise run by Cruise Croatia will set sail on August 8, 2020, and take visitors to all the main GoT locations in the country. It’s pretty exclusive, though: There are only 38 spots available, but if you happen to snag one, you’ll basically get to play Daenerys and Cersei for seven nights.
Some of the trip is centered in Dubrovnik, the jaw-dropping city in the south of Croatia that served as the backdrop of King’s Landing. There’s a stop on St. Dominika, the UNESCO-designated Old Town that doubled as the place where Cersei did her Walk of Atonement. People aboard the cruise will also explore Klis Fortress, a medieval fortress that soars high on a rock bluff near Croatia’s second-largest city of Split, where the show creators filmed many of the scenes in which Daenerys conquered Meereen. Other highlights include the Mineeta Tower, best known as the House of the Undying, and the Lovrijenac Fortress, where King Joffrey’s naming day tournament took place.
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Plus, there are visits to non-GoT gems in the country, including Krka National Park and the Blue Cave grotto.
Seven nights go for $1,895, but four lucky fans can enter a competition to win the cruise for free. The whole thing kicks off with a Game of Thrones welcome pack at the beginning, and then a massive GoT-themed farewell party at the end. Sign me up.
Any Game of Thrones fan who, for the past eight years, has been rooting for Daenerys Targaryen to take the Iron Throne was left very disappointed after the finale last Sunday (May 19), when Jon Snow literally stabbed her in the heart while she was in his arms. (That’s not to say anything of the previous week’s episode, where she went full Mad Queen and left people more than a little upset). And although the close-up shot of the moment left virtually zero doubt that she was dead—and, you know, it was the series finale—Game of Thrones is a show known for its shocking plot twists. Needless to say, fans who are still a little bit in denial about the show’s ending—and Khaleesi’s fate, specifically—have come up with not one, but two theories about how the Mother of Dragons might still be alive. And honestly? They don’t not make sense.
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Theory 1: Daenerys Is a Dragon Now
There’s a warg-centered theory that actually makes for some interesting reading, especially if you’ve gone through the Game of Thrones book series. In the prologue of A Dance With Dragons, wilding Varamyr gets killed but then—twist!—apparently comes to in the body of one of his wolves. “It is possible for the warg to live a type of second life, a much simpler life inside the mind of an animal he controls. In the second life, the skinchanger’s [warg’s] memory slowly fades until nothing of the man is left and only the beast remains,” the passage reads.
Yeah, sure, Bran is the only warg left that we know officially exists, but Dany’s brother Viserys—and a few other Targaryens—also claimed to be dragons. So it stands to reason that Khaleesi could have warged into Drogon.
Theory 2: Kinvara Resurrects Daenerys
OK, so remember Kinvara, all the way back from season six? She was a Red Priestess of the Lord of Light from Volantis. Tyrion and Varys wanted her to mount a good-PR campaign on Daenerys’ behalf (she’s a “liberator,” not a “conquerer”), but Kinvara was already on board and said she thought Dany was Azor Ahai, the Price Who Was Promised.
Now, skip ahead to the finale: King Bran’s people tell him that Daenerys’ Drogon was last spotted heading east, “towards Volantis,” and Bran was all in for using his Three-Eyed Raven sight to find Drogon. Fans think that means Drogon was bringing Khaleesi’s body to Volantis so Kinvara can resurrect her with the power of the Light. Hey, Melisandre did the same thing for Jon Snow, as did Thoros of Myr for Beric Dondarrion (more than once).
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A Little More Potential Evidence
This past season, a fan of the show, or just a sadist, decided to leak the plot points for the last three episodes of the final season on Reddit. Everyone thought/hoped they were fake, but they were surprisingly accurate—like, to the point people thought the snitch had access to inside intel at HBO. Anyway, this person wrote that there was a post-credits scene featuring Dany that didn’t make the cut for the final episode. Whether this involved Dany getting resurrected over in Volantis or still just dead, we don’t know. But she was (apparently) supposed to be there!
As others point out, however, the show is usually good at dropping hints into episodes, if you just look hard enough for them—and surely with a twist this dramatic, the signs would be there. Or are these the signs? Drogon, for his part, is probably taking his mother back to Old Valyria, where Khaleesi was originally from. It’s hard to know for sure, but I gotta say, Daenerys did look pretty dead in her final scene. In any case, fans who wanted something more for Dany after all of that can take some small comfort knowing it might not be totally over for the Mother of Dragons—even if it’s only in their own epilogues for the show.
This post contains spoilers for the final season of Game of Thrones. Consider yourself warned.
People are definitely not over the finale of Game of Thrones, and chances are many of them won’t be for a very, very long time. One good thing about the show ending, though, is that the cast can finally open up about the plot in a way they haven’t before.
Often sworn to secrecy (or not even aware of what was coming next), they had to talk around all sorts of subjects, but not anymore. And sometimes it turns out their opinions closely mirror ours. Take Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who played Bran Stark for all eight seasons. In a twist no one saw coming, Bran became ruler of the Six Kingdoms. This got mixed reactions from fans, and Hempstead-Wright totally understands it.
“Not everyone will be happy,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s so difficult to finish a series as popular as this without pissing some people off. I don’t think anybody will think it’s predictable, and that’s as much as you can hope for. People are going to be angry. There’s going to be a lot of broken hearts. It’s ‘bittersweet,’ exactly as [saga author] George R.R. Martin intended. It’s a fitting conclusion to this epic saga.”
In fact, Hempstead-Wright fully believed that the finale script, in which Bran is chosen as king, was a joke. “When I got to the [Dragonpit scene] in the last episode and they’re like, ‘What about Bran?’ I had to get up and pace around the room,” he said. “I genuinely thought it was a joke script and that [showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss] sent to everyone a script with their own character ends up on the Iron Throne. ‘Yeah, good one guys. Oh s–t, it’s actually real?’”
“I’m happy,” he continued. “Though I kind of did want to die and get in one good death scene with an exploding head or something.”
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