Warning: This article contains spoilers for Game of Thrones' Season Seven finale 'The Dragon and the Wolf'.
Well, that was a dark way to go for Littlefinger. Still, he probably deserved it.
The Stark sisters entrapped him in a public defense of his crimes. Bran was chief witness, Sansa the judge, and Arya the executioner. One slash of the Valyrian steel knife, and Littlefinger's throat was cut open.
Actor Aidan Gillen, who of course has also appeared in The Wire and The Dark Knight Rises, reflected on his exit from the HBO series in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Asked when he got the "infamous call" giving him the news that he'd be leaving, Gillen said: "The infamous call. It's so obvious what it is... [Showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff] never ring you up—maybe once in six years. I learned about that call from [Roose Bolton actor Michael McElhatton] when he told me about his call and he talked about how it made him feel."
"And I thought if I get that call—or rather when as this has got to happen sooner or later to a character like Littlefinger—I wondered how it would make me feel. Because the show is such a part of your life for so many years, you start to think, 'What will your life will be like outside of it?' It's a potent loss.
"You're left a little bereft—for your character and for your experience. It also immediately makes you quantify the hugeness of what that experience has been over the last seven years, which has been massive."
Asked if he knew how Littlefinger would go out, Gillen told EW: "Well, I did an interview with a publication [in 2015] and they asked me how I thought I would go. I said I thought Arya would deliver the blow. So it was as promised. And even within the scene, as soon as he walks in that room and Arya produces the dagger he knows the game is up. He at least suspected the game was up back in episode four when Bran told him, 'Chaos is a ladder.'
"For Bran to come up with that is beyond coincidental. That's when the ground started to shift beneath my feet. At that point, I knew the things I've done in private are not necessarily private."
Game of Thrones will of course be back for an eighth and final season, probably in 2019.
