Game of Thrones Star Says Series Finale “Couldn’t Win,” Hopes Fans Reevaluate It

With Game of Thrones being one of the biggest pop-culture events of the past decade, anyone involved with the HBO series will surely be talking about their time on the project for years, which includes John Bradley, who played Samwell Tarley. Given that it’s only been three years since the series finale, the ways in which the narrative wrapped up are still a point of contention among audiences, with Bradley himself pointing out how, due to the number of fans and the series’ passionate following, he knew there wouldn’t be a way to make all audiences happy, though hopes fans might give it another chance in the coming years.

“It is highly unlikely that we were ever going to please everybody,”  Bradley shared with the Just for Variety podcast. “Chances are we were going to please a fraction of people … We almost couldn’t win. It almost meant too much to people for them to really ever be satisfied. And who knows, when the wounds have healed a little bit in a few years’ time, maybe people will reevaluate it and be able to see it as a complete thing.”

With the series running for eight seasons over the course of a decade and the earlier seasons being based directly on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels, some critics claimed that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss merely “didn’t care” about the show by the time it concluded. Bradley detailed why he took specific issue with those criticisms.

“If they didn’t care, they wouldn’t choose to be standing in a field in Belfast at 3 o’clock in the morning for months on end?” Bradley pointed out. “They wanted to make it as good as possible, and it’s a shame if people didn’t like it because we did try our best to make something very special.”

Bradley isn’t the only former cast member to recently defend the ending of the series, as Peter Dinklage has also been vocal during interviews about his support for the storytelling decisions.

“I think the reason there was some backlash about the ending is because they were angry at us for breaking up with them,” Dinklage shared with The New York Times. “We were going off the air and they didn’t know what to do with their Sunday nights anymore. They wanted more, so they backlashed about that.”

Bradley can next be seen in Moonfall, which hits theaters on February 4th. HBO is currently developing a Game of Thrones prequel series, House of the Dragon, which is expected to debut later this year.

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