Throughout the last seven seasons of Game of Thrones, we've watched beloved characters turn from evil to good, from good to bad, from alive to dead, and dead to alive. They've fallen in love, they've betrayed loved ones, they've traveled and trained. But no character has changed more than Brandon Stark. In just the first episodes he went from a kid who loved to climb to a paraplegic, unable to walk.
Now, at the end of Season Seven, he's fully made the most baffling change of all: from Bran Stark to the Three-Eyed Raven. He now has the entire history of Westeros at his disposal, which he can access through visions. But with these powers, his actions remain mysterious.
Why does he tell people important information when he does? Why does he act different? What does he know and when? And, the most popular theory among fans, is he secretly the Night King? After the Season Seven finale, Esquire.com talked with actor Isaac Hempstead Wright about Bran Stark's motives, his powers, and if he could really be the Night King.
Bran acts weird to his friends and family because he's rightfully distracted.
Our showrunners [David Benioff and D.B Weiss] got me in to talk about how Bran would be now that he has the entire human history downloaded into his brain. And they basically thought that he was going to be like Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen comics. We created this idea of Bran existing in all of these different times at once and accessing every different possible moment at any given time. But we also wanted to make sure it didn't become this boring monotonous performance; we wanted it to still have a bit of mystery and have some glimmer of Bran still there within the character. The coolest thing was, because I got to read the whole script, I played it as if Bran knew exactly what was going to happen by the end. So when Bran is looking at the knife, he's thinking, "Ah, I see this is going to be the knife that kills Littlefinger." It was tricky to get that because there are times when it can become really dull, and [it was important] not let it become dry.
There's a reason he seemed a bit like his old self when meeting Samwell Tarly in the finale.
For that scene, it was Bran discovering something, and it's not that he can't become excited about things anymore. He can think, "Ah, this is an interesting discovery in the history of Westeros—this is cool." In the same way that when he gets to Winterfell, things seem pretty boring there. He's well beyond a high-functioning genius. He literally knows the history of the universe. He gets there and it's like, "Oh, I don't have much to do here. We have this great big war coming and I'm just sitting here." So it's exciting for Bran when this other character comes along, who can learn things and teach him things.
Bran is still learning—that's why he doesn't reveal everything at once.
I don't think he withholds information. The way we've been explaining it is that Bran isn't the old Three-Eyed Raven who has sat in a tree for a thousand years and been through the history of the world. Bran has his Kindle library of every single thing that's happened, but he hasn't gotten time to read it all yet. The other Raven has had an eternity to see everything and know it all by heart. Bran doesn't and still needs time to look it up in his encyclopedias. There's that moment, where he tells Samwell Tarly, "Are you sure? Let me just look this up in my history book and verify." It's the same thing with Littlefinger. It's not like he hadn't told his sisters yet. Bran just needed time to think before they came to him and asked him what was going on, and he was like, "Oh god, look!" Bran isn't ancient yet. He's still a teenager who has all this downloaded in his head. He needs some time.
The old Bran we love is still in there deep down.
The line in that scene sums it up so well: "I remember what it felt like to be Brandon Stark, but I remember so much else now." Bran is now more fixated on the fact that the end of the world is coming, and he needs to do something to help that. I think Bran recognizes that Meera has served her purpose, and her purpose was to get him to Winterfell. It's not Bran being cold, like, "Get out, I don't need you anymore." It's more like, "Thank you, now I need to turn my attention to more important things."
The Night King theory is crazy—but still a possibility.
That theory has really blown up in the last few weeks. I saw someone tweeting pictures of me and the Night King together and were like, "Yep. That's him. Definitive proof!" I was like we don't look that much alike. I saw someone photoshop the Night King's buckle onto Bran and say, "Yep it's him!" I think the cool thing now about this being the last season is that the theories that everyone has are going to tie up. If anyone has had any theory about any of the characters who are still alive will probably get answered now. I personally think the Night King theory is a bit far-fetched, but I would have said the same thing about the Hodor theory. And when I saw that on paper, I was like, "What! No way!" But this is Game of Thrones, and anything is possible. I'd love to be the Night King. That would be so fun to be like, "It was me all along." But I don't know—I doubt it.
He was excited to explore the challenge of becoming the Three-Eyed Raven.
For most of Game of Thrones I had just been playing myself. Bran is like me in more extraordinary circumstances—like that time in the cave when he's just a teenager who goes into a vision on his own. This time I had to develop a whole new character, and it was really, really fun. I really tried to imagine—in any scene, I was thinking about something else or imagining what was going on elsewhere. Because that's really how Bran is: He's got all these timelines diverging at the center of it is his head. It's a pretty crazy thing to experience.
