‘Game Of Thrones’ Season 8 Spoilers May Be Impossible To Find, If This Rumor Is True

Spoilers are not coming — at least not if the Game of Thrones crew has anything to do with it. According to Vulture, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau said the Game of Thrones actors won't receive Season 8 scripts. Instead, their lines will be fed to them through an earpiece. Now, this sounds a tiny bit extreme (not to mention impractical), so it's possible Coster-Waldau was joking. Either that or the writers really don't trust poor Jaime Lannister not to reveal spoilers for the final season.

However, there's no denying that production on Game of Thrones Season 8 is under tight security. Since this is the final season — and it may not air until 2019 — HBO is doing everything possible to keep the show's secrets under wraps until the premiere. In a recent interview with IGN, Liam Cunningham, who plays Ser Davos, revealed that he had read the scripts, but that they could only be accessed in digital form at the show's Belfast headquarters.

Coster-Waldau and Cunningham's different stories point to a bit of subterfuge. If the goal is to keep fans guessing about which spoilers are real and which are foilers, then this is a clever way to do so. The more the cast talks about the secrecy surrounding the scripts, the more it seems even the actors are working on a need-to-know basis this season.

In his interview with the Scandinavian talk show Skavlan, Coster-Waldau revealed that the HBO hack played a role in the tighter security measures being implemented this year. The actor noted that there have always been measures in place to prevent spoilers from leaking as much as possible, but after HBO experienced a major hack earlier this year, the team appears to be getting creative about how to keep the happenings in Westeros quiet for as long as possible. During the interview, Coster-Waldau said,

"And then the hack happened, so now we're not even going to get the script. Now we are going to do a scene, we will be told what's going to happen and then we roll. We're all going to have earpieces for the scene and then someone's going to tell you the line and then your going to do the line."

Perhaps the actor means scripts won't be allowed on the set, because his castmates, including Cunningham and Iain Glen, reported that the cast got together earlier in the week to read through the scripts. At Comic Con Stockholm, Glen said of the read-through, "I suspect that will be about the first time that us as actors find out what's going on. So they don't trust us."

It's likely not the actors that HBO doesn't trust — although, given how horrible Kit Harington was at not revealing to everyone he knows that Jon Snow wasn't dead in Season 6, their ability to keep a secret may play a small role in the implementation of the new measures. Leaks come from everywhere both on set and off as curious fans catch glimpses of scenes being filmed. Stopping all information from reaching Game of Thrones viewers is an impossible task, but by playing up the scarcity of scripts, HBO can certainly give it a shot.

One thing is certain, spoilers for Season 8 aren't going to be plentiful if these rumors turn out to be even remotely true. It's hard to believe a show as intricate as Game of Thrones is going to adopt a practice generally used by telenovelas, but the idea that security surrounding who has access to the scripts is going to be tightened makes sense. This is just one more sign that the end is nigh for Jon Snow, Arya, and Daenerys — and HBO is going to do whatever it takes to make sure the audience experiences Game of Thrones Season 8 as it happens, rather than through a bevy of leaks months before it airs.