Guess Who was More Shocked than Game of Thrones Fans by Battle of Winterfell Ending?

Jon Snow managed to gather an army of the Unsullied, a Dothraki horde, two dragons and all of North to fight the Night King's army. But no one was prepared for the ultimate strike delivered by Arya Stark. Not even Maisie Williams.

The 22-year-old actress, who has been playing the youngest Stark daughter since Season 1, arrived at the practice reading for the final season of Game of Thrones not realizing that Arya Stark kills the Night King, reported Entertainment Weekly.

Like her co-star Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow, she had read the season 8 scripts only in parts, and saved the full reading for the live performance by her castmates around a conference room table in Belfast.

"I was coming into work and everybody was talking about episode 3 and (director Miguel Sapochnik) was like, 'Have you read the [season 3 script] yet?'," she recalled. When Maisie said that she had not yet read the episode, Sapochnik replied, "Oh, I can't tell you then."

The actress couldn't understand his reluctance. "I was like, 'Are we fighting the wights? Does The Night King die? So who kills him? What happens?' And no one would say anything. Why is no one saying it? This is crazy."

When the cast reached the end of episode 3, where Arya saves the Seven Kingdoms and her brother Bran by reaching at the right moment and stabbing the Night King with her Valyrian steel dagger, "it got a huge f**king cheer," co-star Kit said. Incidentally, it was Kit whose character was supposed to reach the Night King first, but Arya beat him to it.

The twist in the plot was so unexpected, that even Maisie was initially worried fans wouldn't like it.

"It was so unbelievably exciting. But I immediately thought that everybody would hate it; that Arya doesn't deserve it. The hardest thing is in any series is when you build up a villain that's so impossible to defeat and then you defeat them. It has to be intelligently done because otherwise people are like, 'Well, (the villain) couldn't have been that bad when some 100-pound girl comes in and stabs him.' You gotta make it cool. And then I told my boyfriend and he was like, 'Mmm, should be Jon though really, shouldn't it?'"

Follow @News18Movies for more