Next year will mark the 10-year anniversary of “Dragonstone,” the first episode of the penultimate season of HBO’s Game Of Thrones—a.k.a., “The One With Ed Sheeran In It.” And while pop culture, as a whole, has gotten on with the business of forgetting most things from those last couple of seasons of the landmark series, the North, as they say, remembers; in this case, that means the Northern English brain of musical superstar Ed Sheeran, who still sounds kind of sad and spooked when he brings this topic up.
This is per an appearance that Sheeran recently made on the new Friends Keep Secret podcasts, a recently deployed project from producer Benny Blanco, Dave “Lil’ Dicky” Burd, and Burd’s wife Kristin Batalucco. The conversation as a whole is pretty chaotic (culminating in Sheeran and Blanco, who’ve produced music together in the past, creating a song together). But there’s a moment of deep reality that sets in when Sheeran brings up—not for the first time—how mad everybody seemed to get at him for popping up in the Thrones episode, saying that he’s been “shit on” many times over the course of his career, but rarely so aggressively.
The podcast hosts note, in an effort to be kind, that a), Sheeran was the one approached by the show’s producers about the cameo, allegedly as a surprise to star (and Sheeran fan) Maisie Williams, and, b), plenty of other famous people, including famous musicians, made cameos on the series. (Although, we’d argue, none quite so prominent as Sheeran, whose cameo includes lots of close-ups of his face while singing a song to his Lannister buddies.) But you can still hear the misery in Sheeran’s voice when Burd suggests fans were “more shitting on Game Of Thrones” than on him, responding with a “Noooo… I feel like that happens quite a lot in my career, just get shit on for things…” (Blanco cuts him off with a different question at that point, but Sheeran goes on to note that a lot of the biggest backlash came circa 2017, calling himself “omnipresent” at the time.)
It feels worth pointing out that Sheeran doesn’t regret the cameo itself, saying he had a good time filming it. (He also makes it clear that he’s not coming at stuff like this with anything less than full fan-ish enthusiasm; the conversation immediately preceding that one was about his tendency to go on PropStore and buy things like the Edward Scissorhands gloves, or Dr. Evil from Austin Powers‘ suit.) But Ed Sheeran does appear to be the last man on the planet still thinking about Ed Sheeran’s Game Of Thrones cameo; in a way, that might be its own special kind of hell.
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