'Game of Thrones'Stars Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke Tease"Relentless" Final Season

The final battle for the fate of Westeros arrives in 2019 — and a new look at the war ahead is already here.


Game of Thrones stars Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke have graced the cover of Entertainment Weekly in full Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen regalia, as a means of previewing the eighth and final season of HBO's smash hit fantasy series. The final six episodes begin airing at some undisclosed point in the new year, and even with a limited runtime, the stars involved promise a breathtaking experience.


"It's relentless; scenes that would have been a one-day shoot five years ago are now a five-day shoot," says Harington. "They want to get it right, they want to shoot everything every single way so they have options." Clarke cosigns Harington's words, adding that every step of the filming process took longer than usual: "[Every] choice, every conversation, every attitude, has this air of 'this is it.' Everything feels more intense."


From creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss all the way down the line, lips remains positively sealed about what to expect from the final run of Game of Thrones. Given where the story last left off, it's not hard to surmise some of what's ahead. Jon Snow, Daenerys and Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) have put out the call to rally the realm in the face of the White Walkers, slowly making their way down from far beyond the Wall and into Westeros proper. In the season seven finale, the Night King and his forces finally broke through the Wall, with House Stark's ancestral home of Winterfell the likely next stop on their campaign against the living.


"It's about all of these disparate characters coming together to face a common enemy, dealing with their own past, and defining the person they want to be in the face of certain death," says co-executive producer Bryan Cogman, speaking with EW. "It's an incredibly emotional, haunting, bittersweet final season and I think it honors very much what [author George R.R. Martin] set out to do — which is flipping this kind of story on its head."


Even when Game of Thrones ends its story, the greater tale surrounding Westeros will continue on. HBO is developing several successor shows set in the World of Ice and Fire, including an unnamed prequel set thousands of years before the events of Thrones. Jane Goldman and Martin himself are the creators of that project, which has already started casting (including bringing aboard stars Naomi Watts and Josh Whitehouse) with an eye toward filming a pilot in the new year. The aforementioned Cogman is among a group of other writers who have been tapped to develop shows set within the Thrones universe, though no further announcements have been made in their regard.


Speaking previously with The Hollywood Reporter, HBO programming president Casey Bloys said that any Game of Thrones successors, if greenlighted, would not air "until at least a year after the final season." The exec also added that he did not expect every one of the scripts to move forward beyond the page.