Jaime Lannister himself is as much in the dark as everyone else about season 8 of Game of Thrones, as star Nikolaj Coster-Waldau is claiming the cast will not be getting full scripts for the upcoming final season.

Game of Thrones recently wrapped up its penultimate seventh season, which saw the show ramp up into legitimate summer blockbuster territory, as the long scattered characters and storylines began to converge to take on the mounting threat from the Night King and his army of White Walkers. The show was still improbably breaking its own ratings records in season 7, as it grew more popular than ever, even as it endured a series of embarrassing leaks.

Coster-Waldau is suggesting those leaks have played a part in the show’s increase in secrecy. On the Scandinavian talk show Skavlan (via Fansided) Coster-Waldau suggests that there’s been an escalation in the measures taken to keep the scripts secret over the years.

The first season we got the scripts like you should get them and then you could sit and do notes and stuff. And then after a couple of years, they got paranoid because there was some leaks so we had to get them only digital, on a PDF file.

Coster-Waldau suggests this past season’s high profile leak has apparently led to some rather extreme measures.

It’s possible - maybe even probable - that Coster-Waldau is exaggerating a bit. The process he’s describing here would be nearly impossible to make work on a production of Game of Thrones’ scale and quality. But the message he’s sending is fairly clear - the show’s producers are very serious about keeping the final season’s secrets under wraps. That will be a long battle; recent reports have indicated the show will be filming well into 2018, making a 2019 premiere more than likely. That’s a long time to keep information about the most popular show on television under wraps, but the show’s producers are clearly going to make a concerted effort to guard the end of their story as well as they can.

And then the hack happened, so now we’re not even going to get the script. Now we are going to do a scene, we will be told what’s going to happen and then we roll. We’re all going to have earpieces for the scene and then someone’s going to tell you the line and then you’re going to do the line.

Next: What Will Game of Thrones’ Endings Be – And Which One Will Be Real?

Game of Thrones season 8 will premiere on HBO sometime in 2018 or 2019.

Source: Fansided