Peter Dinklage comes to the defense of the controversial series finale of HBO’s Game of Thrones, saying fans only wanted a happy ending.
Tyrion Lannister actor Peter Dinklage offered his thoughts on the backlash to the Game of Thrones series finale, arguing that fans would have been angry with any ending, especially that it wasn’t a happy ending where the “pretty white people” ride off into the sunset.
The subject of Game of Thrones came up in a New York Times interview primarily focused on Dinklage’s new film Cyrano. Dinklage disagreed with author George R.R. Martin’s statements that the TV series would have been better off running for two more seasons. “It was the right time. No less, no more. You don’t want to wear out your welcome, although I’m not sure that show could have,” Dinklage said. “But I think the reason there was some backlash about the ending is because they were angry at us for breaking up with them. 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.”
Dinklage continued, “We had to end when we did, because what the show was really good at was breaking preconceived notions: Villains became heroes, and heroes became villains. If you know your history, when you track the progress of tyrants, they don’t start off as tyrants. I’m talking about, spoiler alert, what happened at the end of Game of Thrones with that character change. It’s gradual, and I loved how power corrupted these people. What happens to your moral compass when you get a taste of power? Human beings are complicated characters, you know?”
Dinklage agreed that people were upset by the lack of a happy ending for the eight-season series, but argued that people should move on from complaining about the ending they got. “They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together. By the way, it’s fiction. There’s dragons in it. Move on,” he said. Whether that was, in fact, the source of the majority of the criticisms is debatable. One of the biggest criticisms of the final season was how Nathalie Emmanuel’s Missandei, one of the few women of color on Game of Thrones, was killed primarily to further the development of the white antihero-turned-villain Daenerys, played by Emilia Clarke.
“The show subverts what you think, and that’s what I love about it,” Dinklage said about the finale. “Yeah, it was called Game of Thrones, but at the end, the whole dialogue when people would approach me on the street was, ‘Who’s going to be on the throne?’ I don’t know why that was their takeaway because the show really was more than that. One of my favorite moments was when the dragon burned the throne because it sort of just killed that whole conversation, which is really irreverent and kind of brilliant on behalf of the show’s creators: ‘Shut up, it’s not about that.’ They constantly did that, where you thought one thing and they delivered another. Everybody had their own stories going on while watching that show, but nobody’s was as good as what the show delivered, I think.”
Cyrano, starring Dinklage, opens in theaters Jan. 21, 2022.
Source: The New York Times
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