Excluding those on HBO’s payroll, there’s a very short list of people who actually know how season eight of Game of Thrones is going to end.

These people are the chosen ones, the lucky few, the very blessed individuals who have been given the knowledge of how the last episode of the fantasy epic is going to shake out, and who is going to win and who is going to die.

But who are these lucky people? And how did they find out? 

Emilia Clarke’s mum

By this point, Emilia Clarke has gotten very good at secret-keeping. What with eight seasons of Game of Thrones under her belt, alongside a Star Wars and a Terminator film, not spilling pop culture tidbits has become second nature to this actress.

But even she had to share the ending of the final season with one person. Clarke admitted to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show that she told her mum what happened in the finale, even though she wasn’t supposed to.

“The good thing about telling my mum was that she’s a vault,” Clarke said. “Because she’s [already] forgotten it.”

She added: “If she falls asleep on a plane, I’m quite worried she’s going to say it [talking in her sleep] and not know it happened.” 

Joe Jonas

The pop singer is engaged to Sophie Turner, so naturally he knows how Game of Thrones ends.

Turner revealed recently that Jonas accompanied her on set for most of season eight and that HBO took his presence very seriously.

“He had to sign an NDA,” she said. “He had to have full photo approval on set, his camera was covered up, everything.”

It’s a good thing he signed that NDA, too, because Turner says Jonas has very loose lips. “You can give him a call, he’ll probably tell you everything,” she joked. 

Gemma Whelan’s baby

In 2017, Gemma Whelan gave birth to a baby girl, and that baby girl was the guest of honour on Game of Thrones’ final season. It is known.

“She knows how the show ends,” Whelan told the Guardian. “If only babies could talk, she could spoil it all.” 

Previously, Whelan has spoken about hiding her pregnancy from producers on the set of The Crown. “I was five months pregnant… and I didn’t tell them because I was too scared,” she told Sky News. “See this is the thing, of women in film and TV, I was too scared to tell them at the time I was pregnant in case I lost the job, and course when I did tell them they were so celebratory.” 

Someone who doesn’t know? George RR Martin

“I haven’t read the [final season] scripts and haven’t been able to visit the set because I’ve been working on Winds,” Games Of Thrones’ author George RR Martin told Entertainment Weekly. 

“I know some of the things,” he added. “But there’s a lot of minor character [arcs] they’ll be coming up with on their own. And, of course, they passed me several years ago. There may be important discrepancies.” 

Martin also revealed that he was offered a cameo in the final season but that he couldn’t make it to Belfast for filming because he was too busy working on his new Game of Thrones book. 

Also, Rose Leslie 

She might be a Game of Thrones alumna herself – and married to Jon Snow, the King in the North – but Rose Leslie doesn’t know how season eight of the show ends.

“I genuinely don’t know the ending,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “He told me the ending of last season and I remember getting a bit uppity about that… He happened to tell me – and this is a spoiler for anybody who hasn’t seen the last season – he happened to tell me that one of the dragons fall into the ice lake, and then we see the dragon being dragged out of the water and the dragon breathes fire – or ice, I can’t quite remember which one it is, I think it’s fire – onto The Wall, and then, of course, that’s when all the [Army of the Dead] can then cross over.” 

Leslie wasn’t happy about having this detail spoiled for her, she said. “I got rather livid with him, because I said, ‘You weren’t supposed to tell me everything! And that’s a huge piece of information!’ And he’s like, ‘Well you asked!’ And I was like, ‘I know.’” 

So there you have it: Rose Leslie knows nothing about the ending of Game of Thrones. But Joe Jonas, Gemma Whelan’s baby and Emilia Clarke’s mum do. Lucky things. 

Game of Thrones returns to HBO in the US on 14 April and to Sky Atlantic and Now TV in the UK on 15 April. 

Images: HBO, Getty