Game of Thrones cast defends final season at Comic-Con: Conleth Hill blames backlash on "media-led hate campaign"

Variety

Seven Game of Thrones stars showed up at Comic-Con Friday -- two days after creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff pulled out -- to respond to the backlash over the eighth and final season. For the most, the fans attending were respectful after clearly being disappointed in the final season. "We’re very grateful for your fandom over the years and I think this is the reality rather than a media-led hate campaign," said Conleth Hill, who played Varys. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau also weighed in, saying that there was no way the final season would please everybody. “It comes to an end it’s gonna piss you off no matter what because it’s the end,” he said. “If you hated the ending, if you loved the ending, that’s great, just don’t call people names.” Coster-Waldau also said he liked Jaime and Cersei's Lannister's much-derided death scene. “I thought it was perfect for him to end in the arms of Cersei, it made sense to me, that’s just my opinion,” he said. Hill and Coster-Waldau were joined by Liam Cunningham, Jacob Anderson, Maisie Williams, John Bradley and Isaac Hempstead Wright. Hill also addressed his expressing disappointment over the final season in a May interview with EW, telling the publication he found his storylines in the final seasons "kind of frustrating." “I was absolutely gutted to make it so far but not quite reach the end,” Hill clarified at the Comic-Con panel. “For the record, I loved all my ten years on Game of Thrones. It was a life-changing experience and the one thing the last (season) was about is the futility of conflict and the pointlessness of war. If you take one thing from that show, take that.” ALSO: ALSO: A Comic-Con executive urged the crowd to "accept each other’s fandoms" before the Game of Thrones panel.