14 DAY TRIAL // This week, one fan theory about “Game of Thrones,” about Jon Snow’s parentage to be more exact, started making the rounds online. It’s backed up by evidence from both the TV series and the George R.R. Martin books and it’s so convincing that even Sean Bean is buying it.
The actor starred in the first season of the show as the very noble and highly idealistic Eddard / Ned Stark, who was killed off because, really, can you think of any movie in which Sean Bean doesn’t die until halftime?
We kid: Ned was beheaded by King Joffrey Baratheon, leaving fans and his own family with the question of Jon Snow’s parentage unanswered. Admittedly, Snow is Ned’s bastard, whom he fathered in the year he was away from home fighting King Robert’s war.
However, fans believe they have not only tracked down Jon’s mother but his father as well. The video below best explains this scenario, but to sum up, we’ll just say that Jon is the son of Ned’s sister Lyanna and King Rhaegar Targaryen and thus, pretty much the most important player in this “game of thrones” everyone is playing.
If that’s really the case, then Jon Snow’s importance to the plot has been hugely underestimated – and let’s be honest here, we all knew that he was very important.
A couple of days ago, Vulture caught up with Sean and asked him if he’d come back to the show if producers asked him to, in order to shoot flashbacks. By the fifth season premiering in spring 2015, Ned’s son Bran will have fully developed a connection to the heart trees, which means he will be able to “see” through them in every Godswood, both in the present and the past.
Bean, as we also reported at the time, seemed thrilled at the idea of coming back, saying he would imagine flashbacks would be just the way to explain certain things left unexplained in the narrative.
But here’s what he also said that you might have missed the first time around (emphasis ours): “And that should happen, shouldn’t it? I’ve definitely got some unfinished business that needs to be resolved there. I’m obviously not Jon Snow’s dad. And you need that to be revealed at some point, don’t you? So Bran would kind of be the one having the flashback, and he would see Ned praying, right? And revealing those things? You never know what those guys are going to do with that.”
That’s Sean Bean confirming the R+L=J theory right there.
It’s widely assumed that actors on any TV show are privy to certain details regarding the plot, which aren’t revealed to fans because they count as spoilers. This isn’t always the case, but it sure seems like it with Sean Bean, who knows that Ned isn’t Jon’s real father, as the story so far would have us believe.
Then again, you can’t really trust an actor when they say these things: Bean could be just expressing his own opinion, unconfirmed by any detail that’s been shared with him by producers, or he could be just toying with us by telling us what he knows we want to hear.
But wouldn’t it be awesome if he was really speaking the truth, confirmed to him by producers?
