Game of Thrones actor reveals why Season 8 won’t arrive for so long

"Sometime in 2019."

That is the closest to a definitive date anyone can come up with for when we'll get eyes on the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones. With the guts of two years to wait (or more, who knows for certain? Not us.), there are already plenty of understandable reasons as to why the final handful episodes will take so long to make, including the fact that they have gigantic budgets being pumped into them, making GOT officially the most expensive show ever made. Plus, there is the feature-lengths now assigned to each and every one of them, so there would appear to be a lot of epic-ness to get through. However, Iain Glen (aka the recently-cured-of-greyscale/sad-trombone-sound-made-flesh Jorah Mormant) told fans this week at the Stockholm Comic Con (via Radio Times) that the reason behind the delay is even more obvious than that:

"We’re all starting to occupy the same territory, we’re all starting to be in the same storylines and so they can’t [have two filming units] anymore. I think this last season will take much longer to shoot because they can only use one unit because we’re all in the same sort of scenes."

Previously, different film units could be set up in Ireland, Spain, Iceland, Croatia or Morocco to film the various storylines separately, but now that everyone will be essentially in the same place, that time-saving measure no longer exists. They're looking to take 10 months to shoot the 6 episodes - whereas it took about 5 months to shoot 10 episodes in previous seasons - which gives a good indication of just how large scale the final few will be. Bring on 2019.