Jim Broadbent confirms who he is playing in Game of Thrones season 7. We have that plus everything else you need to know.
And like that, our summer joy quickly vanished, its warm embrace fading into the bitter taste of a winter’s kiss in a seeming instant. For despite Game of Thrones finishing its 2016 season before even the Fourth of July, White Walkers were on the move… and we are now deep in our snowy wait until at least June 2017... desperately keeping an eye on the horizon for the Others who march.
Aye, Game of Thrones season 7 will consist of seven episodes and debut possibly several months later than expected, confirming the icy dread that fans have expected for months now: the Long Night of Winter is here, and the coming summer will be shorter than ever.
“Now that winter has arrived on Game Of Thrones, executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss felt that the storylines of the next season would be better served by starting production a little later than usual, when the weather is changing,” Casey Bloys, president of HBO programming, said in a statement. “Instead of the show’s traditional spring debut, we’re moving the debut to summer to accommodate the shooting schedule.”
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But there is plenty of good news too. Join us in this living and breathing document as we anticipate the coming ice storm!
Latest Game of Thrones Season 7 News
It looks like we can confirm what many long expected: Jim Broadbent's mysterious role in the seventh season of Game of Thrones will be as the archmaester of the Citadel in Oldtown. The news was broken by ScreenCrush, who asked the Oscar winning actor about what he'll be doing on the HBO flagship. And surprisingly, Broadbent gave this candid answer: "I'm a maester, an archmaester. I'm an old professor character."
Broadbent is well known for many roles, including his award winning turn in Iris and, in a personal favorite, as the hot-blooded master of ceremonies in Moulin Rouge! However, in his later career, he has enjoyed playing professorial roles, including in Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Prince. And given that the season 6 finale of Thrones set up Samwell Tarly and Gilly meeting the archmaester who runs what is basically the solitary education campus in all of Westeros (no wonder they're still in the Middle Ages over there!), it seemed like a safe bet that this would be Broadbent's role.
Game of Thrones Season 7 Release Date
As has been much discussed, Game of Thrones season 7 was delayed until an unspecified month in summer 2017. The reason for the delay was previously explained by showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss on the UFC Unfiltered podcast. Apparently, now that winter is finally here (it only took six years!), it means that production will have to start later--in September to be exact--to allow for the proper grim and gray weather necessary for Westeros.
“No … we don’t have an airdate yet, but this year it’ll probably be a bit later,” the showrunners told UFC Unfiltered hosts Matt Serra and Jim Norton. “[Because] we’re starting a bit later because at the end of this season, ‘winter is here,’ and that means that sunny weather doesn’t really serve our purposes anymore. So we kind of pushed everything down the line, so we could get some grim, grey weather even in the sunnier places that we shoot.”
Now we may have a month to go with that delay... July 2017 to be exact. Indeed, Liam Cunningham, who plays Ser Davos Seaworth on the series, let slip in a recent interview that he has heard the Game of Thrones season 7 release date to be July 2017.
While chatting with The Independent, Cunningham revealed, "I've been disappointing various people around the world because it was meant to come out in April. It's July now, I think."
The actor further hinted that the season 7 premiere might be something out of the norm for the series, saying, "There's going to be a launch and something special happening this year for the premiere. The bad news is, there will only be seven episodes and the final season starts again as far as I know in September." Could this mean the premiere could be a 90-minute episode or longer, such as the season finale Westworld enjoyed in 2016? We'll know... eventually.
Game of Thrones Season 7 Episode Count
First, HBO unsurprisingly greenlit Game of Thrones for a season 7 before season 6 even aired. Building up the week of hype for the premiere, the premium cable network nonchalantly confirmed a seventh season in late April, but tellingly did not reveal the length.
We now know that it will be seven episodes, something that Benioff and Weiss have hinted for months now. But also worth noting is that at this time, season 8 looks poised to only be a mere six episodes.
Benioff and Weiss also confirmed this is the gameplan still while chatting with Deadline after season 6 concluded. On the endgame, Benioff said, "It’s two more seasons we’re talking about. From pretty close to the beginning, we talked about doing this in 70-75 hours, and that’s what we’ll end up with. Call it 73 for now."
This would appear to confirm that season 7 will stick to their initial plan as a seven-episode affair. Still, maybe they'll realize they need an extra one or two episodes in season 8, so we'll get more than just six hours for the final year?