Warning: This post contains spoilers from the Sunday, April 28, episode of Game of Thrones.
If you were caught off guard by the Battle of Winterfell’s big deaths, you weren’t alone. When reading the script for the third episode of the final season, Kit Harington was shocked when he found out that not only was The Night King murdered, but it was at the hands of Maisie Williams’ Arya Stark.
“I was surprised, I thought it was gonna be me!” he told Entertainment Weekly after the episode. “But I like it. It gives Arya’s training a purpose to have an end goal. It’s much better how she does it the way she does it.”
When Theon (Alfie Allen) was killed by The Night King, the villain turned his attention toward Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright). However, his attention was diverted just long enough for Arya to come flying at him with a Valyrian steel dagger. He grabbed her, causing her to drop it for a moment … into her other hand! So, she stabbed him, turning him to icicles and, in turn, destroying the rest of the walkers.
Many viewers had thought Jon Snow would be the one to end The Night King – and Harington, 32, understands why.
“I think it will frustrate some in the audience that Jon’s hunting The Night King and you’re expecting this epic fight and it never happens — that’s kind of Thrones,” the Emmy nominee shared. “But it’s the right thing for the characters. There’s also something about it not being the person you expect. The young lady sticks it to the man.”
When Williams read the script, she found it “so unbelievably exciting,” but feared the audience reaction.
“I immediately thought that everybody would hate it; that Arya doesn’t deserve it. The hardest thing is in any series is when you build up a villain that’s so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them,” she told EW. “It has to be intelligently done because otherwise people are like, ‘Well, [the villain] couldn’t have been that bad when some 100-pound girl comes in and stabs him.’ You gotta make it cool. And then I told my boyfriend and he was like, ‘Mmm, should be Jon though really, shouldn’t it?’”
However, after the scene with Melisandre (Carice van Houten), she knew Arya was the right choice.
“I realized the whole scene with [the Red Woman] brings it back to everything I’ve been working for over these past six seasons — four if you think about it since [Arya] got to the House of Black and White,” the Doctor Who alum said. “It all comes down to this one very moment. It’s also unexpected and that’s what this show does. So then I was like, ‘F—k you Jon, I get it.’”
Game of Thrones airs on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
