When President Obama met the director of Game of Thrones‘ shocking season five finale recently, he had a very important question: “You didn’t kill Jon Snow, did you?’”
Game of Thrones director: I told President Obama that Jon Snow is “deader than dead”
HBO
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
According to the director himself, David Nutter, Nutter responded by telling the president, “Jon Snow is deader than dead.” Obama griped, “You keep killing off my favorite characters.”
Nutter first recounted the story to Entertainment Weekly’s James Hibberd on Friday before telling it again at a San Diego Comic-Con panel. Could this be final confirmation that Jon Snow is gone for good? Or could the Game of Thrones creative team’s desire for secrecy be so intense that they’ll even go so far as to mislead the president of the United States?
My money’s on the latter, for a few reasons. First of all, insisting Jon is dead doesn’t go further than what showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have already said. Benioff has referred to the “death of Jon Snow,“ and Weiss has said that ”dead is dead.” The question most fans have isn’t whether Jon Snow is dead. It’s whether he’ll magically return from the dead, through Melisandre’s powers or some other means. Nutter’s answer sheds no light on that.
Second, though Nutter’s title as a Game of Thrones director may seem impressive, he only helms certain episodes of the series, does so in a way that carries out the showrunners’ wishes, and isn’t involved in the writing process at all. Indeed, he’s not even returning to the show next year, and recently told Deadline that he has “no idea what happens at all in season six,” calling it a “Dan [Weiss] and Dave [Benioff] question.” So Nutter could simply be in the dark.
Third, there’s the ongoing matter of Kit Harington’s hair. To play Jon Snow, Harington keeps his hair quite long. Many have speculated that a conspicuously un-Jon-like haircut would count as confirmation that Harington has truly exited the show. Well, here’s how the actor looked at Wimbledon last week:
Karwai Tang/WireImage/Getty
Now, I’m not a total truther. Nutter also told EW’s Hibberd that Stannis Baratheon’s offscreen death in the season five finale was a real one, which I do believe. But there are just so many story reasons to expect Jon Snow’s return that I’m not buying Nutter’s claims — even if he’s making them to the leader of the free world.
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