“Game of Thrones” returns on Sunday night and all eyes will be on what happens at The Wall.
Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) was killed at the end of Season 5, stabbed to death by his own men of The Watch. The first full trailer from Season 6 revealed Liam Cunningham’s character, Davos Seaworth, by Jon Snow’s body.
“The speculation is fantastic,” Liam told Access Hollywood of the reaction to the first trailer HBO dropped for Season 6, back in March. “It’s wonderful to see.”
Among the theories he’s seen on the Internet is one concerning Jon’s direwolf, Ghost.
“Somebody else freeze framed it and brightened up the very dark thing and saw Ghost in the corner and somebody said, ‘Sweet Jesus! That man’s — why is he going to cut Ghost’s head off?'” Liam said, recounting one of the things being speculated about by fans on social media.
Liam couldn’t offer any hints about what is going on in those brief trailer snippets, but he did talk about the headspace Davos is in after the Season 5 finale, where he learned the man his character had pledged his sword to – King Stannis Baratheon – is dead.
“It’s worse than that because not only has he lost Stannis, but he’s lost this beautiful, surrogate daughter that he had, who kind of [provided] the only little bit of love that he had in his life,” Liam said. “Not only that, when Stannis sent him back, to get him out of the way, he was bonding with Jon Snow, so all of his reasons for even being in the show have gone up in smoke. So we’re in a very interesting position with this man. What is he going to do? Why doesn’t he just hop up on a horse, ride off into the sunset and out of the show?”
That, of course, isn’t Davos Seaworth’s way. He may be a former smuggler, but he’s been an honorable character across the seasons.
“As people said, he’s not a leader. Like I’ve said to people — I may have said it to yourself — I kind of always saw him as that kind of Tom Hagen character from ‘The Godfather,’ you know, Robert Duvall’s character, where he’s a consigliore,” Liam said. “He’s a guy you go to for advice and a guy who’ll tell you if he thinks you’re wrong and be able to lay out the reasons why, but he doesn’t have anybody that requires that help.”
Melisandre might though. She returned to The Wall at the end of Season 5, looking crushed.
But she has a big, crushing secret. Davos isn’t aware that “the red woman” (coincidentally the name of Sunday’s episode), a red priestess he’s had troubles with over the seasons, had a strong hand in the death of his beloved surrogate daughter, Shireen.
“When we leave at the end of Season 5… from Episode 9, the audience are one step ahead of Davos because we’ve obviously seen who did it and what happened to Shireen. He doesn’t know, so when she comes back at the end of 5 and walks in, all he knows is that his world is gone. He doesn’t know why, so going into 6, we’ve got to assume unless somebody comes up and goes, ‘You’ll never guess what she did!’ then he ain’t going to find out,” Liam said. “I don’t think she’s going to offer that information.”
“Game of Thrones” returns with the premiere of Season 6 Sunday night at 9 PM ET/PT on HBO.
— Jolie Lash
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