Game of Thrones Cast Won’t Even Receive Scripts While Shooting Season Eight, Says Star

HBO continues to take extreme anti-spoiler measures in the production of the final season of Game of Thrones, as star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau said on Scandinavian talk show Skavlan (per the AP) that the cast won’t even be given scripts while shooting season eight. Instead, they’ll be fed their lines via earpiece, a tough new acting challenge for everyone who isn’t Hodor.

Coster-Waldau explained that for the show’s first few seasons, the actors were given hard copies of scripts in advance, which later became digital copies in an effort to ramp up security. In the most recent installments of Game of Thrones, cast members received their parts via verified email. But after HBO was hacked over the summer, resulting in multiple episodes of the series leaking online, the pay-cable network went on high alert—hence, no scripts of any kind.

While shooting without scripts sounds like an extreme (and potentially detrimental) measure to take to prevent spoilers, the Game of Thrones team have already thoroughly demonstrated that they’re willing to go several extra miles to protect their show’s secrets. As HBO president of programming Casey Bloys revealed in September, the producers will shoot multiple series finales in order to obfuscate the story’s real ending. The funny part of all this? Game of Thrones fans don’t seem to care a lick about spoilers. Even when season seven’s “The Spoils of War” leaked online a couple of days before airing, the show’s staggering ratings were unaffected: The episode actually set a Game of Thrones ratings record (at the time), drawing in 10.2 million viewers.

Game of Thrones season eight won’t air any time soon—recent estimates place the show’s return squarely in 2019, as it shoots through next summer—but when it does, it’s going to be epic.