Game of Thrones Showrunners Reveal Why They Created the Night King For the Series

One of the biggest single threats in Game of Thrones, the Night King, isn’t in the books, and the showrunners have revealed why they created him. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss spoke with EW and discussed the creation of the character, who does not appear in George R.R. Martin’s books. As Weiss says, the reason was to give the White Walkers (who are canon in the books) an origin story.

“We’ve seen what the White Walkers do, we’ve seen how they perpetuate themselves and created the wights,” Weiss said. “If you’re going backwards, well, they made these things… so what made them? We always liked the implication that they weren’t some kind of cosmic evil that had been around since the beginning to time but that the White Walkers had a history — that something that seems legendary and mythological and permanent wasn’t. They had a historical cause that was comprehensible like the way the wars on screen we’re seeing unfold are comprehensible. They’re the result of people, or beings, with motivations we can understand.”

Vladimir Furdik plays the Night King in the series and will do so in the final season, which bows on April 14th. It’s fair to assume he will prove lethal to at least a few of our remaining living characters before the series concludes.