Natalie Dormer played Margaery Tyrell in Game of Thrones from 2012 - 2016, and appeared in Seasons 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. The character's story reached an explosive end when Qyburn, on Cersei Lannister's orders, ignited wildfire beneath the Sept, killing hundreds.
The Captain America: The First Avenger actress departed Westeros before Game of Thrones' hugely divisive final season. However, in a resurfaced interview with Vanity Fair (via TVLine.com), Dormer revealed the co-star she was glad to say goodbye to.
"I don't want to see that cat ever again," she said of Ser Pounce, a.k.a. King Tommen Baratheon's pet feline. "He was a diva. He was nothing but trouble! He kept upstaging Dean [-Charles Chapman, who played Tommen], and myself."
"He wouldn't do as he was told. That's just cats for you. I don't know if the direwolves are as bad," the actress continued, echoing remarks made by co-showrunner David Benioff in 2019.
"Cersei hated the name 'Ser Pounce' so much she could not allow him to survive," he joked. "So she came up with her most diabolical [execution]. Ser Pounce's death was so horrible we couldn't even put it on the air."
Co-showrunner D.B. Weiss later added, "If you buy the super-extended, super-charged Game of Thrones box set that comes out, the death of Ser Pounce will be in there. Just one whole episode devoted to the death of Ser Pounce."
As a standalone eighty-minute piece of television, the Game of Thrones finale certainly wasn't that bad. However, like Lost, The Sopranos, and so many other great TV shows before it, the series' legacy will be tarnished by a divisive and disappointing ending, which continues to haunt its stars in interviews to this day.
With so many fan theories and such a great deal of excitement surrounding the final six episodes, it was always going to be tough for Benioff and Weiss to deliver a finale that was to everyone's liking. Campaigns for Season 8 to be remade have, somewhat unsurprisingly, gone nowhere.
Since Game of Thrones ended, HBO has launched House of the Dragon and will follow that with Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. There's been nowhere near as much controversy with those, and each is set to continue through 2028.
"You always hope everyone’s going to love anything you do, and it would’ve been great if 100% of people loved it, but they didn’t," Benioff acknowledged last year. "You can get so bogged down in public opinion that you spend your whole life googling things and trying to find people who felt one way or the other way."
Addressing how fans have reacted in person, Weiss shared, "There’s an underlying decency when people acknowledge you as a person and vice versa. There’s something that happens in the transition from human interaction to online that pushes things in a specifically aggro direction."
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