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Did This Game Of Thrones Actor Predict The Finale Years Before It Aired?

Contains spoilers for Game of Thrones

In the off chance you haven't heard Game of Thrones fans freaking out over the series' finale, not a lot of people expected the show to end the way it did — particularly regarding the person who ended up taking the Iron Throne... or what was left of it after Drogon burnt it down. Someone who wasn't surprised to find out the winner of the game of thrones was Brienne of Tarth actress Gwendoline Christie, who seemingly predicted the outcome nearly two years ago. 

We're about to get into explicit spoilers here, folks. Last warning!

In July of 2017 just ahead of the season 7 premiere of Game of Thrones, Christie and her co-star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who portrayed Jaime Lannister, sat down for an interview with ExtraTV's Mario Lopez. They got to talking about who they believed would sit on the Iron Throne when all was said and done — and while Coster-Waldau felt like either Emilia Clarke's Daenerys Targaryen or the fearsome Night King would be the conclusive winner, Christie had another idea. 

"Don't you think it's gonna be someone out of left field?" said Christie. "Don't you feel that those are, those seem like the obvious choice? And what we know about the show is that it constantly surprises you, so I'm wondering if it might be Bran."

She then offered her reasoning for this theory: "Just because we keep seeing the world from his perspective, don't we? We keep seeing the visions. So, is he in the future, projecting in the past?"

Coster-Waldau did buckle and agree that Game of Thrones would probably reveal someone other than Dany or the Night King as the winner, considering how many shocking twists the series has taken before. However, he just couldn't get on board with the thought of Bran Stark, whose personal narrative arc saw him somewhat abandon his identity as a human to become the omniscient Three-Eyed Raven, ultimately ruling Westeros. 

"The Three-Eyed Raven as the king? No, it doesn't make sense ... Because he's already planning the future, he's seeing into the future and the past," the actor said, to which Christie retorted, "How do you know we are currently in the present in the story? The story might not be in chronological order, it might not be literal." 

She then insisted that her speculating that Bran would become king and suggesting that Game of Thrones was perhaps being told out of order could mean that the Three-Eyed Raven made Jaime push the little Stark boy out of the Winterfell tower in season 1, thus starting this whole big mess and paving the way for Bran to take the Iron Throne.  

Looking back on the interview now, it's hard not to get chills hearing Christie accurately guess that Bran Stark would become the Protector of the Realm. But as precise as her prediction was, Christie isn't secretly a Three-Eyed Raven herself. She's one of many people who guessed that the strongest contenders for the Iron Throne wouldn't seize it, and that an unconventional somebody like Bran would win the whole shebang. Game of Thrones fans have been predicting the "Bran's gonna be king" ending for years now — as early as 2013 as far as we could find. 

One fan posted on Twitter way back when Stannis Baratheon was still alive and gunning for the kingship, "after deep thought, we have come to the conclusion stannis or dany have the strongest claim to the throne, but bran is probably gonna win it." Another tweeted more than six years before the Game of Thrones finale aired, "I think Bran will end up a king. King in the North, a King Beyond the Wall, or the King on the Iron Throne. But I deffo think he'll be king."

Christie and countless others may have seen the conclusion coming, but the guy who plays Bran was totally blindsided. Actor Isaac Hempstead Wright initially thought that the ending was a joke, and believed that Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had sent every cast member fake scripts in which their respective characters became the new ruler of Westeros. "I genuinely thought it was a joke script," he said. "'Yeah, good one guys. Oh s***, it's actually real?'"

Technically speaking, Christie did predict the ending of Game of Thrones, insofar as the kingship is concerned, but so did a bunch of other people. Maybe they're all blessed with some kind of real-life equivalent of greensight, or perhaps they've just gotten used to expecting the unexpected from Game of Thrones that they settled on the most surprising possible pick for the Iron Throne and ran with it. Of all the players in the game of thrones, Bran certainly is the wild card.