‘Game of Thrones’ Showrunners Reveal Their Favorite Deaths of the Series

[The following story includes spoilers for Game of Thrones seasons four and six.]

Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are opening up about their favorite deaths on the hit HBO series.

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During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast while promoting their new Netflix series, 3 Body Problem, the writers were asked if they had a favorite character death they had written over the course of their careers.

“With Thrones, there was so much killing of good guys,” Weiss said, “and we finally got to really kill both Joffrey in season four and Ramsay Bolton in season six. It was fun to go back to the old-fashioned joys of just killing off a really bad guy. … It felt like it was balancing the scales a little.”

Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) died after drinking poisoned wine, at the hands of Lady Olenna Tyrell and Lord Petyr Baelish. After Jon Snow (Kit Harington) beats him in a one-on-one fight, Ramsay (Iwan Rheon) is locked in the kennels as a prisoner and later eaten by his hungry hounds as Sansa (Sophie Turner) watches.

“For me, at the end of Battle of Bastards, when Sophie sticks the hounds on the Bastard, she doesn’t walk away. You don’t really see the death. You see some of it in the background, but you don’t really see the death,” Benioff shared. “But what you do see is Sophie or Sansa’s smile.”

He explained that they did that all in one shot and had to film it all the way through seven or eight times until Turner did it perfectly. “It was just that feeling of — that’s so epic,” Benioff added. “Sophie was so good. When she got that shot, I felt like I can now die happy.”

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