WARNING: Major spoilers ahead for the Season 7 finale of Game of Thrones! Continue reading at your own risk…
Sunday night’s season finale of Game of Thrones saw the death of the master manipulator Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish. The cunning character was portrayed over the last seven seasons by Irish actor Aidan Gillen, who spoke out about feeling “bereft” after learning that Littlefinger‘s storyline was coming to an end.
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The showrunners of the HBO series, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, gave Gillen, 49, a call to inform him that his character was going to be killed off this season.
“The infamous call. It’s so obvious what it is. [Weiss and Benioff] never ring you up — maybe once in six years,” Gillen said during an interview with EW. “I learned about that call from [Roose Bolton actor Michael McElhatton] when he told me about his call and he talked about how it made him feel.”
He continued by saying: “And I thought if I get that call — or rather when as this has got to happen sooner or later to a character like Littlefinger — I wondered how it would make me feel. Because the show is such a part of your life for so many years, you start to think, ‘What will your life will be like outside of it?’ It’s a potent loss.”
When asked about the emotions that set in learning that he was no longer going to be a part of GOT, Gillen said: “You’re left a little bereft — for your character and for your experience. It also immediately makes you quantify the hugeness of what that experience has been over the last seven years, which has been massive.”
When Gillen discussed Littlefinger’s death with Benioff and Weiss, they mentioned that it was going to be gruesome.
“They just promised me a ‘river of blood.’ Well, it wasn’t really a river of blood, but they promised me more than poor Michael [McElhatton] got,” he said. “It’s better to go out at the end of [the season] with a good arc than at the start of episode 2.”
In the current season, Littlefinger’s plan was to pit Arya Stark (Maisie Williams) and Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) against one another. It proved to be a faulty plan, but Gillen believes that the uncertainty of his maneuver was something that made Littlefinger tick.
“With carefully laid plans there’s always a bit of risk involved. He’s put himself in a situation that could backfire on him. I think he likes it. [His plans] are never fail safe. But he puts himself on the line like a good gambler,” he said.
The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones is scheduled to begin filming this fall.
