Sophie Turner says “Game of Thrones” won’t return until 2019, and the long night is here
Put away the lemon cakes and take out that bottle of wine because it’s going to be a long time before we hold our final Game of Thrones premiere parties. It’s been long speculated that Game of Thrones wouldn’t be back until 2019, but now we officially have our first confirmation — and it’s from a member of the cast.
Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa Stark on the hit series, recently spoke with Variety about the HBO hit series’ final season and the upcoming X-Men: Dark Phoenix. In the interview, she casually dropped that Game of Thrones will remain in our hearts and not our HBO screens until 2019.
Speaking about her upcoming projects post-Game of Thrones, Turner revealed, “Game of Thrones comes out in 2019.”
Turner’s direct statement definitely fits with Liam Cunningham’s explanation of the final season’s long production schedule. Without directly saying the show would be back in 2019, Cunningham, who plays Ser Davos Seaworth, revealed that final season — which will feature only six episodes, because life is cruel — has a much longer film schedule than previous seasons.
“[The episodes are] definitely going to be bigger and what I hear is longer, Cunningham explained. “We’re filming right up until the summer. When you think about it, up until last season we’d have six months to do 10 episodes, so we’re [doing] way more than that for six episodes. So that obviously will translate into longer episodes.
While the news doesn’t come as too much of a surprise — over the summer HBO programming head Casey Bloys confirmed that there was a pretty big chance the series wouldn’t be back until 2019 — hearing an official confirmation is still a bit of a blow.
The final season of Game of Thrones is currently filming in Belfast, meaning we have one year to prepare for an all-out showdown between Team Targaryen/Stark-Snow/Jaime Lannister/people of Westeros, the army of the dead, and Cersei Lannister.