'Game of Thrones' Actor Says He Never Thought Jaime Would Do This [SPOILERS]
By Ryan Carroll
This story includes spoilers for 'Game of Thrones' Season 8 Episode 5, "The Bells," and Episode 6, "The Iron Throne."
The dust has settled after the finale of Game of Thrones, which aired this past Sunday night. Among many other events, the episode definitively revealed that Jaime and Cersei Lannister did, in fact, die in last week’s episode, “The Bells,” when they were buried under mounds of rubble. This death came as a surprise to many fans, who were holding out hope that it would be Jaime to finally kill Cersei—but even Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the actor behind the character, said he never thought that Jaime would do it, despite theories to the contrary.
“I never thought he would kill Cersei. He wouldn’t do that,” Coster-Waldau said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. He added that Jaime’s ending actually echoed events from earlier in the series, during a conversation in Season 4: “Bronn asked, ‘How would you want it to end?’ And Jaime says, ‘In the arms of the woman I love.’ So this was foreshadowed and that’s what happened.”
Though fans have expressed dismay and frustration at the turn, saying that Jaime’s return to Cersei undoes his transformation from a ruthless killer to an honorable knight, Coster-Waldau felt that Jaime’s actions completed the arc of the character, even if it was hard to watch. “It is heartbreaking,” he said. “It does make sense, even though you don’t want it to.”
The confirmation of Jaime's death did not mark the end of his story, however. Later in the episode, after becoming the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Brienne of Tarth records all of Jaime's actions, in a callback to a conversation earlier in the series, and concludes with the line, "He died protecting his Queen." When asked about the ending, Coster-Waldau said that, “I don’t think they could have done it any better. It makes sense.”
Jaime's redemption story has made him a fan-favorite and symbol of what made Game of Thrones great. We're still feeling a little sore about how things turned out for him, but we know that we certainly won't be forgetting him.