Can you imagine Game of Thrones without Theon Greyjoy? Theon went through a huge transformation on the show and was played beautifully by Alfie Allen, but what if he’d been killed off much earlier in the show?
Thankfully, it never happened, but David Benioff and D.B. Weiss did try to trick Alfie into thinking his character was going to be killed all the way back in season two!
While appearing on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Alfie revealed he was given a fake script with Theon dying at the hands of Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead-Wright). The showrunners were likely looking for a dramatic reaction, but instead got the opposite.
”Well, the script was given to me, and basically, I kind of give this rousing speech, if I may say so myself.
”So at the end of this speech, Bran sort of pops out from somewhere and stabs me in the chest and says, ‘This is my Winterfell, not yours.’ And so I kind of just took it on the chin and got on with it, you know.”
It wasn’t until after Alfie had finished shooting season two that the rest of the cast told the showrunners they should probably tell him the truth.
”I think about three weeks passed where I had kind of finished my shooting for that season, and people in the cast were kind of telling David and Dan, because they had given me this fake script with this kind of fake ending — that maybe you should tell him that it’s fake.”
He added that they must have assumed he would have thrown a tantrum about it by that point, “People decided to tell them that maybe you should call him, cause he might be tearing his hair out, but I wasn’t, I was sunbathing.”
With Alfie being so chill about getting killed off, the joke’s really on D.B. and David.
The actor then went on to say that they played a similar prank on Kit Harrington, who played Jon Snow, where the script said that a White Walker burnt off all his hair so he would have had to wear a bald cap for the rest of the series.
Watch the full interview below:
