Kit Harington has promised the new series of 'Game of Thrones' will be "very different" to previous seasons.
Kit Harington
The hunky actor - who portrays Jon Snow int he HBO fantasy drama - says the upcoming seven episodes are much more fast-paced than previous installments of the saga.
He said: "This season is really different than any other season because it's accelerating toward the end, a lot of stuff collides and happens much much quicker than you're used to seeing on 'Thrones' ... It's so different than what everybody is used to. It's quite exciting."
And his co-star Nikolai Coster-Waldau was shocked when he read the scripts because the upcoming season - which is shorter than previous series by three episodes - is so intense.
He told Entertainment Weekly: "I feel like I'd been lulled into a different pace.
"Everything happened quicker than I'm used to ... a lot of things that normally take a season now take one episode."
Producers insist the faster pace is not due to the shorter season, but because war is finally upon the characters.
Showrunner D.B. Weiss explained: "Things are moving faster because in the world of these characters the war that they've been waiting for is upon them.
"The conflicts that have been building the past six years are upon them and those facts give them a sense of urgency that makes [the characters] move faster."
Fellow showrunner David Benioff added: "For a long time we've been talking about 'the wars to come.
"Well, that war is pretty much here. So it's really about trying to find a way to make the storytelling work without feeling like we're rushing it -- you still want to give characters their due, and pretty much all the characters that are now left are all important characters.
"Even the ones who might have started out as relatively minor characters have become significant in their own right."
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