Game Of Thrones Creators Confirm Their 2 Favorite Deaths (And They're Perfect)
It's an understatement to say that a lot of characters died on "Game of Thrones" — to the point where fans might joke that they never got attached to characters for fear they'd be killed off. A lot of those deaths also happened to beloved characters like Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) and Robb Stark (Richard Madden), Barristan Selmy (Ian McElhinney), and Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel). However, when it comes to character deaths that brought nothing but joy and relief, showrunners and creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have two specifically in mind: Joffrey Baratheon and Ramsay Bolton, respectively played by Jack Gleeson and Iwan Rheon.
During an interview on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast with Josh Horowitz, where the creators were there to discuss their new show "3 Body Problem" on Netflix, Horowitz asked the duo if they had a "favorite" death from their first big series. "With Thrones, there was so much killing of good guys," Weiss responded, "and we finally got to really kill both Joffrey in season 4 and Ramsay Bolton in season 6. It was fun to go back to the old-fashioned joys of just killing off a really bad guy."
It definitely makes sense that killing these two bad guys felt good for Benioff and Weiss; it was certainly a cathartic experiences for audiences to watch as well. So how did Joffrey and Ramsay meet their bitter ends?
Joffrey Baratheon died a really gross death — at his own wedding
Every "Game of Thrones" fan fondly remembers where they were when they watched Jack Gleeson's Joffrey Baratheon succumb to poison and die at his own wedding. The actor, it should be said, was extraordinarily good as Joffrey, a child of incest and secret bastard to King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy). The character's sniveling, sneering cruelty was predictably constant, yet horrible to watch. For nearly four seasons, Joffrey terrorized the Seven Kingdoms, taking particular delight in tormenting his one-time fiancée Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) ... but he gets his comeuppance in the Season 4 episode "The Lion and the Rose," which focused almost entirely on the political wedding between Joffrey and Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer).
After spending most of his wedding reception bullying his uncle Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), Joffrey settles down long enough to take a bite of pie and a sip of wine ... and then starts choking to death. Sputtering and turning purple, he points directly at Tyrion before dying in the arms of his real father Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his mother Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), falsely accusing his uncle of murder. The truth? Margaery's formidable grandmother Lady Olenna Tyrell (the late Diana Rigg) and Petyr "Littlefinger" Baelish (Aidan Gillen) were behind the murder, and both watched as Joffrey died in a particularly gruesome way.
Ramsay Bolton died after a massive battle, killed by his 'loyal beasts'
Then there's Ramsay Bolton, one of the most sadistic characters in television history (played to disturbing perfection by Iwan Rheon). Ramsay's hobbies include hunting women and torturing people, and when Petyr Baelish gifts him Sansa Stark's hand in marriage, he brutalizes her too. Eventually, when Sansa's "brother" Jon Snow (Kit Harington) learns that Sansa is being held as Ramsay's wife and prisoner, he wages war against Ramsay, leading to the epic Season 6 episode "The Battle of the Bastards." After Jon defeats Ramsay in hand-to-hand combat and overcomes his army, the psychopath's final moments belong to Sansa, who feeds him to his own starving hounds, a last scene Rheon believed to be absolutely lovely.
On the podcast, Benioff and Weiss weighed in on Ramsay's death, noting that it was particularly satisfying to shoot thanks to Turner's vicious performance as she puts her tormentor face to face with the dogs he intentionally starved. "You don't really see the death," Benioff pointed out. "You see some of it in the background, but you don't really see the death," he said. "What you do see is Sophie's smile. It was all in one shot, and we did it seven times or something... She nailed it on the seventh or eighth time, and it was just that feeling of — that's so epic. Sophie was so good. When she got that shot, I felt like I can now die happy."
To relive these two ultra-satisfying "Game of Thrones" deaths, fans can find the epic fantasy series streaming on Max.