Just last month, Game Of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke claimed she didn’t know anything about what was going to happen in the show’s series finale, but Nikolaj Coster-Waldau at least seems to have a much better idea of what’s going on. Speaking with Variety, he said that showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff “couldn’t have done a better job” ending the story, but apparently doing a good job that good came with a huge price tag. “We’ve worked harder than ever before,” he explained, adding, “We spent twice as much shooting these six episodes than we did on two full seasons before. No expense has been spared.”
He didn’t give any specific details beyond that, but if these final episodes were as expensive as he claims, we can make some easy assumptions about them. For one thing, there will be a lot of ice zombies, dragons, and ice zombie dragons, but that stuff was all in previous seasons already. If these episodes are as expensive as Coster-Waldau says they are, then they must feature one of the most expensive things in TV history: the entire cast of Friends. Assuming they still get $1 million per episode, that would cost HBO about $36 million. Combined with the ice zombies, regular CG soldiers, and big CG castles, that would probably run up a pretty steep bill.
Anyway, Coster-Waldau says he’s already shot his last scene, but there’s still something left he has to do before he’s totally done with Game Of Thrones—or at least done filming Game Of Thrones, since he understands that the world will always see him as Jaime Lannister. The final season will premiere on HBO next year.