However you felt about the final season of Game Of Thrones, the off-screen death of King Tommen’s furry friend Ser Pounce was objectively a cat-astrophe.
Pounce originally appeared in the fourth series, jumping on the bed while Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) was putting the moves on Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman). But in light of both Tommen’s and Margaery’s deaths in series six, Ser Pounce’s fate was largely unknown.
“I like to think he’d also move on with his life and get a girlfriend maybe,” Chapman told HuffPost at the time.
Ahead of series eight though, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss revealed to Entertainment Weekly that Pounce’s nine lives had run out at the hands of Cersei (Lena Headey).
“Ser Pounce’s death was so horrible we couldn’t even put it on the air,” Benioff said.
So, at New York Comic-Con on Thursday, HuffPost asked Chapman for his reaction to Ser Pounce’s off-camera demise.
“Yeah, it took me. It got me. I cried,” he joked, before saying he hadn’t actually watched the last season of the series, but had heard what happened.
“There’s so many different versions of what could happen in it, and the way it went, that’s just the way it went. So Ser Pounce had to die. Just the way it was,” said Chapman.
Perhaps making the death a little easier to bear for Chapman (other than the fact Ser Pounce was a fictional cat) was finding out he was cast in his new project, director Sam Mendes’ 1917.
The actor said it was the happiest he’s ever been, saying:“I just screamed, and when I got off the phone, I still screamed.
The World War I movie, slated for this December, depicts the story of two young British soldiers, Blake (Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay), as they try to deliver a message in time to stop a devastating attack. Besides the intensity of it being a war film, 1917 aims to look like one continuous shot.
“None of it was easy,” Chapman explained. “Blake and Schofield get sent on this mission to save 1,600 men’s lives, and Blake’s own brother is one of the 1,600. So Blake’s stakes throughout the whole film are so high and, as an actor, to turn up every day and every single take be able to portray that, that was emotionally draining for me. But I loved every single minute of it.”
Leaving us with some parting words for Ser Pounce, Chapman said: “He had a good life, and Tommen looked after him very well. He was well-fed, well-watered and Tommen took care of him. He’s now with Tommen, so it’s not so bad. It’s not such a bad ending.”