Faithfully adapted from George R. R. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire, HBO’s medieval fantasy series Game of Thrones offers plenty of suspense, action, and character drama – and fans of the show should expect more in its second season.
Martin himself is looking forward to seeing things unfold on screen, admitting today while on a press stop in Toronto that even he hasn’t seen any of the episodes from season 2 yet. That said, there is one episode he’s especially excited about.
“I’m pretty excited about my own episode, which again, I haven’t seen but I know what was in the script,” he says. “It’s episode nine, which is the Battle of the Blackwater, probably the biggest battle in the books. It’s a massive set piece. We hired Neil Marshall to direct it – it’s the first time he’s ever done television. [He's a] very well-known British director whose done Centurion and The Descent, [and] Dog Soldiers – relatively low-budget movies but with terrific, visceral action sequences and a great visual look to them, so we’re hoping he’ll bring all that to the screen.”
In addition to the big battle sequence, fans can also look forward to meeting new characters.
“Lots of great new characters will be joining the mix,” Martin says, with a chuckle. “Even though I am notorious for killing my characters, I do keeping throwing new ones in there, too, so you don’t miss the dead ones that much. Gotta keep a full larder just in case I want to kill some more.”
Waiting a few months for the next season of a show can be agonizing for certain fans. But when it comes to the show’s source material, fans are no strangers to having to wait even longer.
“The next Ice and Fire book will be [done in] a few years. I’m working on it but these are gigantic books. The last one was fifteen hundred pages [long] in manuscript; I suspect this next one will also be fifteen hundred pages. I’ve given up predicting how long that’s going to take me to write that, because every time I do make a prediction I’m wrong, and then people come howling with torches and with pitchforks outside of my house. ‘My god! You said it would be by the end of the year and it’s not! You lied!’ So I don’t want to predict any more. I just write one page at a time and it’ll be out, I hope, eventually – and even more important, I hope it’ll be good.”
You can catch our interview with George R. R. Martin in a future episode of EP. Season 2 of Game of Thrones premieres on HBO and HBO Canada on April 1, 2012.
