If there’s one bit of prescience that exists in George R.R. Martin’s original outline for his Song of Ice and Fire saga, it’s that there would have been a forward time jump after the third book. Following the events of book three (and in show terms, season 4), the entire saga would have jumped forward 5 years to bring a lot of the younger characters to a more appropriate age for the violence that would ensue.
Martin chose not to include this gap and thus, the show has followed suit. There is no 5 year jump between any of the seasons and the kids of Game of Thrones are aging rapidly. The show tried to offset this by aging up a number of characters, including Jon Snow and Sansa Stark, but they will eventually run into a few problems in which the year-to-year production schedule allows the actors to age well-beyond their characters.
Such is the case with Bran Stark, played by Isaac Hempstead Wright. As we see above in this first look at season 6, courtesy of Entertainment Weekly, he’s looking much older than he was the last time we saw him. Of course, Bran and Hodor and all their friends did take the entirety of season 5 off. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the character is much older. According to the timeline of the books, Bran would be about 10 years old in A Dance with Dragons, the book that’s being mined for the most recent season. Hempstead-Wright, now 16, can get a youthful haircut all he likes, but he’ll never be 10 again.
This probably won’t be a problem. It’s more an interesting tidbit that allows us to explore some of the inherent problems of long-running TV adaptations. You simply can’t film them fast enough to account for actors getting older. The kids, they grow up so quick. Especially the ones who have avoided being brutally murdered in Westeros.
Bran will return, alongside Hodor, Meera Reed and Max von Sydow as the Three-Eyed Raven when Game of Thrones season 6 hits HBO in April.
0 comments:
Post a Comment