
In perhaps the most, ahem, stark difference, if Game of Thrones had stayed completely true to its source material, Robb Stark (Richard Madden) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) would have been only 15 and 14 years old, respectively.



Bran was supposed to be 7, while the actor who played him (Isaac Hempstead Wright) was 12 Arya (played by Maisie Williams) went from 9 to 13, while Sansa (Sophie Turner) went from 11 to 15 and Rickon (Art Parkinson) from 3 to 6. When the book A Game of Thrones starts off, the Stark children are much younger than their on-screen counterparts. The Stark kids were different ages in the show than in the books. In the original pilot, Catelyn Stark and Daenerys Targaryen were played by Jennifer Ehle and Tamzin Merchant, respectively by the time the show aired, they had been replaced by Michelle Fairley and Emilia Clarke. Catelyn Stark and Daenerys Targaryen were originally played by other actors. One of the biggest problems? None of the friends he and Weiss invited to watch the pilot “realized that Jaime and Cersei were brother and sister, which is a major, major plot point that we had somehow failed to establish.” In 2019, a copy of that original script was unearthed, which revealed a number of interesting details. “We got everything wrong on a very basic level with the writing of it,” show co-creator David Benioff told Variety. The first pilot, directed by Spotlight writer-director Tom McCarthy, was so terrible it had to be shelved and reshot. There’s an unaired Game of Thrones pilot. Martin’s prequel House of Dragons to hit HBO, here are 70 facts about Game of Thrones to tide you over. The series wrapped up with its final season in 2019, but there’s more Thrones TV on the way. And, of course, it made us all want a dragon of our own.

Over the course of eight seasons, Game of Thrones broke many records, created a few controversies, and gave us 73 ambitious episodes of television.
