‘Game of Thrones’ Actors Cried as Characters Were Killed off, HBO Execs Reveal

HBO executives did their best to talk about Game of Thrones without spoiling anything at the INTV conference in Jerusalem on Tuesday, though they may have given a hint when they revealed how the cast reacted to the last few scripts.

The premium cable network’s Vice President of Drama, Francesca Orsi, said that the last season is something of a sob-fest, as many characters in the main cast die off “one by one,” according to a report by DailyMail.

Orsi didn’t ay out any details of the six-episode long massacre, but she said that the enormous cast was extremely emotional, especially during an early table read. None of the actors had read the scripts before sitting down together, and Orsi said the verbal run-through was “powerful.”

“None of the cast had received the scripts prior, and one by one they started to fall down to their deaths,” Orsi said.

The more characters that gave their lives in the script, the more tears began to fall among the actors.

“By the end, the last few words on the final script, the tears just started falling down. Then there was applause that lasted 15 minutes.”

The news comes shortly after Orsi misspoke on another panel at the conference, while discussing the budgets of both Game of Thrones and Big Little Lies.

“From a budget standpoint, going into season 2 of Big Little Lies without any options in place, we’ve been… um… short of raped,” she said, according to a report by Deadline.

She later apologized for the “poor choice of words” in a statement published by Entertainment Weekly. The flub was followed by a number of teases about Game of Thrones, which is quickly approaching its climactic final season in 2019.

While at the conference, Orsi also said that HBO has a plan taking shape for Game of Thrones once the main series is finished. She told the panel that the network has plans for “three, four, five spinoffs” all set in the mythical world of Westeros, Essos and beyond.

This will be the first series HBO revisits after its finale, but Orsi said “it feels like corporate malfeasance to not continue it. $50 million (per season) would never fly for what we are trying to do. We are going big.”

Each spin-off is expected to start with the same budget that the original series got in its first few seasons.