'Game of Thrones' is casting two young characters who could be almost anyone
As Game of Thrones gears up for its final season, incredibly, it seems there are still new characters to introduce.
According to a casting call uncovered Tuesday by the Thrones blog Watchers on the Wall, the show needs two child actors for important roles in Season 8, which starts filming in November.
The first role is "Northern girl," for which the producers are looking for an 8 to 10 year old actor with an accent. She's "a strong-minded young girl with a fighting spirit." Remind you of anyone?
The second role is simply described as "boy" -- notably not Northern -- in roughly the same age range, 8 to 12. He's from a poor background, physically fit and is likely to "completely own the scenes that he appears in," according to the report, much as Lyanna Mormont completely owns hers.
It's a little late in the day to introduce new characters, though that certainly never stopped George R.R. Martin. His two latest books in the series, Feast for Crows and Dance With Dragons, are positively stuffed with them.
There are two basic possibilities here: one, that we're looking at a couple of kids who participate in the coming war against the White Walkers. As the undead pour through the Wall, the show is going to need some way to dramatize their assault on the North. We're going to need to be reminded of the stakes.
What better way to do that than to make us care about a couple of child soldiers it can then kill off?
The second most likely possibility is that we're looking at another flashback sequence. Northern Girl could be another Lyanna, the late Lyanna Stark, whose life and loves started more warfare than Helen of Troy.
Bran saw Lyanna giving birth to Jon Snow at the end of Season 6 and marrying Rhaegar Targaryen at the end of Season 7, so it would stand to reason that the Three-eyed Raven might want to dig further into her past, when she grew up at Winterfell.
A flashback to the hardscrabble childhood of a non-Northern pre-teen boy, however, could be any number of lowborn characters. Gendry, perhaps, learning of his Baratheon father in the brothels of Kings Landing?
At this stage, your guess is as good as ours. All we can say is, prepare yourselves: new characters are coming.
Topics Game Of Thrones
Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.
