'Game Of Thrones' Season 6 News, Spoilers: 'Jon Snow Is Dead,' Creators Confirm; George R.R. Martin Open To Spinoff
The debate about whether or not Jon Snow (Kit Harington) will be dead or alive when HBO's "Game of Thrones" premieres its sixth season has been raging for months.
Now, just days before season 6 makes its hotly anticipated debut, "Game of Thrones" co-creators and show runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have confirmed that Snow is really and truly dead. According to the "Game of Thrones" bosses, the clue was in the Lord Commander's eyes as he lay bleeding in the snow at the end of the season 5 finale.
"Jon Snow is dead," the two said in an interview for this week's Variety cover story.
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"If you look at his eyes there," Benioff said. According to the two, a lot of time and money was spent getting that aspect of Snow's death scene right.
"Your pupillary muscles relax when your body gives up," said Weiss. As he explained to the magazine, they did a lot of research on the Internet about what is called the "pupillary sphincter." He is also revealed that if a viewer looks closely at Jon's pupils in that scene, the one that is in the light actually dilates.
Benioff and Weiss also spoke about continuing the "Game of Thrones" story without "The Winds of Winter," the sixth novel in George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" saga, on which the popular fantasy drama is based. Earlier this year, Martin announced that he had missed the deadlines for "Winds of Winter" and that the novel will not be published ahead of the sixth season of "Game of Thrones."
"This is us carrying the story forward from the end point of the final book," Weiss said. "That was both very exciting and a bit terrifying at times."
Meanwhile, with the announcement that the next seasons of the award-winning series will be much shorter than previous ones, Martin recently said that he is open to the idea of a "Game of Thrones" spin-off.
"There is certainly no lack of material," the novelist told Entertainment Weekly.
"There are eight million stories in Westeros as well," he said, referencing the voice-over in the police drama series "The Naked City," "and even more in Essos and the lands beyond."
"A whole world full of stories, waiting to be told… if indeed HBO is interested," he added.
The sixth season of "Game of Thrones" premieres on Sunday, April 24, on HBO.
