Unlike the House of Stark who knows winter is coming, George R. R. Martin didn’t really know what he was in for when he first set out to write A Game of Thrones.

In fact, the very first chapter, he previously told The Guardian, popped into his head “out of nowhere” back in 1991.

“When I began, I didn’t know what the hell I had,” the author—who turned 76 on Sept. 20—added to the outlet back in 2018. “I thought it might be a short story; it was just this chapter, where they find these direwolf pups. Then I started exploring these families and the world started coming alive. It was all there in my head, I couldn’t not write it. So it wasn’t an entirely rational decision, but writers aren’t entirely rational creatures.”  

Fast-forward several hundred pages—and a full book series—later, fans were bending the knee to Martin’s creation. So much so that in 2011, HBO debuted a series based on the novels called Game of Thrones. Still, Martin wondered if the tales of the people of Westeros would appeal to a broader audience.

“You put a crab in hot water, he’ll jump right out,” he explained to The New York Times ahead of the premiere. “But you put him in cold water and you gradually heat it up — the hot water is fantasy and magic, and the crab is the audience.”

Let’s just say, the attention around the show—much like the fire out of the dragons—was red-hot. Over the course of its eight-season run, Game of Thrones—which starred Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Peter Dinklage, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Lena Headey and more—racked up almost 60 Emmys, the most of any drama ever.

This was a shock to Martin as he never thought the book series would make it to the screen after years of Hollywood execs telling him his scripts were too costly to produce and contained too many characters.

"At a certain point, I got so tired of that that when I went back to books and I started this, I said, 'I am writing a series of novels here. I don’t have to worry about the budget. I don’t have to worry about what’s producible. I’m gonna write something that’s as big as my imagination,'" he said on a 2019 episode of the Maltin on Movies podcast. "'I can have as many settings as I want. I can have as many characters as I can want. I can have castles that are like no castle ever built on Earth. I can have dragons, I can have dire wolves, I can have battles with thousands and thousands of people on each side. And no, it’ll never be made into television of films—absolutely unproducible. But I’m writing books. So I don’t care about that.'"

But “as irony would have it, of course,” the writer continued, “that is what became the biggest hit in television and the thing which my name will always be associated as opposed to all the shows and movies I wrote in the early 90s deliberately designed to be a television show, to be producible, to be something that we can do.”

Though, fans had some feelings about the way the series ended in  2019.

“By Season 5 and 6, and certainly 7 and 8," Martin told The New York Times in 2022, "I was pretty much out of the loop." (creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff declined the outlet's request for comment at the time).

Still, he seemed surprised by viewers' stark reaction.

“I don’t understand how people can come to hate so much something that they once loved,” Martin told The Independent in 2022. “If you don’t like a show, don’t watch it! How has everything become so toxic?”

And it’s clear viewers do still want to watch content based on his worlds—with the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon premiering in 2022 (though Martin recently shared what he really thought of season two and the changes made from his book Fire & Blood).

So to mark Martin’s birthday, take a seat—throne or not—and see the Game of Thrones stars then and now.

Prior to making his onscreen debut as knower of nothing Jon Snow, Kit Harington acted on stage in the National Theatre's adaptation of War Horse.

When he auditioned for the role of the Stark siblings' honorary brother, Harington told W Magazine, "I had a black eye. I had been in a fight the night before...with this guy in McDonald's. I think that man who punched me in the face may have helped me get the job!"

Despite his pivotal importance to the show, Jon's mind-blowing (though ultimately brief) death at the end of season five got to the actor, who said he "had a shaky time" afterward.

"That was a time when I started therapy, and started talking to people. I had felt very unsafe, and I wasn't talking to anyone."

Eventually, Harington came to embrace his and Jon's importance to the show, adding, "It took me a long time to not think, I'm the worst thing in this."

In addition to returning to the stage (True West, Henry V, Slave Play), joining the MCU in The Eternals and popping up on HBO's Industry, the native Londoner married GOT love interest (before the sister stuff) Rose Leslie in 2018.

"I thank the show for everything," Harington told GQ. "But more than anything else, I thank it for introducing me to her."

The private pair share two children, a son born in 2021 and a daughter who arrived in 2023.

For her audition to play Jon's Wildling lover Ygritte, the Downton Abbey alum, went in pretty blind, not really getting how big the show was. 

"I went into the audition unprepared," she admitted during an interview. "I wasn't aware of the show, I hadn't watched the first season...I didn't realize the pressure. Had I known the pressure I don't think I would've landed the job in the first place. I was happy I was naive for the first round." 

While Ygritte only survived two seasons on the show, she left a lasting impact on Jon...and Harington. 

"We had a great chemistry together, I think," Harington said, picking their first day of filming together as his favorite day on set.

After her time on GOT came to an end, Leslie joined the cast of The Good Wife spin-off The Good Fight, made a surprise cameo during Harington's Saturday Night Live hosting debut to heckle him from the audience and had big-screen roles in The Time Traveler's Wife and Death on the Nile.

And, see above, she shares two children with her husband.

Like the elevated-overnight Khaleesi, Emilia Clarke learned on the go as her character's power trip became the focal point of the show, racking up four Emmy nominations in the process.

Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, became so popular that Beyoncé, Mother of Blue Ivy, once came up to her and said, "Oh, my goodness, it's so wonderful to meet you. I think you're brilliant."

Ahead of the premiere of GOT's final season in 2019, Clarke revealed in a New Yorker essay that, years beforehand, she had suffered two aneurysms after filming the show's first season and underwent brain surgery at 24.

"It saved my life, literally," she wrote of the life-changing series. "The entire show, the family that is a part of this show, and the show itself, saved me, and Khaleesi, Mother of Dragons, saved my life for sure."

After Jon Snow put an end to Danaery's fiery power trip on the series finale, Clarke has since starred in the twisty tear-jerker Last Christmas and played Nina in a West End production of Chekhov's The Seagull.

Sophie Turner was just 14 when she began playing Sansa Stark, having landed her first-ever onscreen role after auditioning for the part at her high school during her lunch break.

Over the course of playing the increasingly tortured (but ultimately triumphant) Sansa, Turner convinced her parents to adopt Zunni, the dog that portrayed her character's dire wolf Lady.

And while it was a real-life crush on Justin Bieber that informed her approach to Sansa being infatuated with the irredeemable Joffrey Baratheon, Turner ultimately married Joe Jonas in 2019. Her sister in Stark-ness, Maisie Williams, was one of her maids of honor.

Turner and Jonas split up in September 2023, but share two daughters, Willa and Delphine, and the actress is now dating fellow Brit Peregrine Pearson. 

While she mostly focused on family after her long reign on GOT ended (and she was the titular villain in the 2019 X-Men installment Dark Phoenix), Turner returned to the small screen in the 2022 true crime drama The Staircase and starred in the 2024 ITV series Joan.

Speaking of Joffrey, that old so-and-so, Irish actor Jack Gleeson did a bang-up job playing the creepy, entitled prince (and, soon, king in need of a wife...and then another wife).

After Joffrey was dispatched via poison in 2014, Gleeson pressed pause on acting to finish his studies at Trinity College Dublin, where he founded Collapsing Horse Theatre Company with some schoolmates. 

He's since returned to the small screen, showing up on Sex Education and The Famous Five, and has multiple projects coming up, including Safe Harbor with GOT alum Alfie Allen. 

On the personal front, Gleeson married actress Róisín O’Mahony in 2022.

A girl had no experience, with Game of Thrones serving as a then 12 year-old aspiring dancer Williams' second-ever audition. 

"It's like school to me, it's really shaped me as a person," she said in an HBO featurette. "I'm so confident, I've got this confidence from the show and playing Arya."

But growing up in the public eye wasn't easy for Williams, who said on the Happy Place podcast with Fearne Cotton, "I think I just went through a lot of real revelations where I was like I'm not very happy doing this and pretending everything was fine."

After GOT, Williams said, she wanted to "try to do more things that I'm excited for rather than what people want me to do."

She has since starred in the X-Men spin-off The New Mutants, the U.K. limited series Two Weeks to Live and Pistol, and played Christian Dior's plucky sister in the WWII-era Apple TV+ series The New Look.

On the personal front, Williams dated race car driver Ollie Jackson for a few years, then was in a relationshp with Reuben Selby until 2023—for long enough that she marked their breakup on Instagram as the "end of an era."

Wright was cast as Bran Stark (aka the Three-Eyed Raven aka Bran the Broken, King of Westeros) when he was just 10 years old and found "soccer club too cold" while growing up in the English countryside, he said on Jimmy Kimmel Live. "So I thought what else could I do? Drama club."

Not only did he not avoid the cold, it turned out to be difficult to matriculate at university in 2017 while destined for greatness on the biggest show in the world.

In addition to being unable to have the "normal" experience amid all the built-in attention, he told Esquire  U.K., "I couldn't relax and go out and have a drink or get drunk or whatever, because if I did someone would be like: 'I saw Bran and he was all f--ked up.'"

He dropped out early, not least due to his intense shooting schedule, but returned to college in 2019 to study neuroscience. 

Still, after spending half of his life on GOT, he wrote in a 2019 essay for The Hollywood Reporter, "People adore the thing I have been a very small part of, and that is something very special indeed."

He has since appeared in the 2021 sci-fi thriller Voyagers.

Along with Sean Bean, who played the noble Ned Stark (for one season), Peter Dinklage is the only other original cast member who did not have to audition, so recruited he was to play Tyrion Lannister.

"When I first heard they were interested in me for a fantasy show, I went, 'Ugh, no!' Especially being my size, I'm not really interested in playing a fantasy of a person," the Station Agent star reflected in an HBO interview. "I'm an actor, I like to portray real people, and sometimes in the world of fantasy that gets lost. This was the opposite."

He ultimately won a record four Emmys for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.

Since GOT ended, Dinklage has most notably starred in Cyrano, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and Unfrosted, as well as lent his voice to Rick and Morty and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

Off-screen, he shares a daughter born in 2011 and a son born in 2017 with his theater director wife Erica Schmidt, who wrote the stage musical production of Cyrano that was adapted into his 2021 film.

It was Lena Headey's good friend Dinklage who recommended the 300 actress for the role of Tyrion's tyrannical sister Cersei Lannister.

During her run as the scheming queen regent, Headey went through a divorce and custody battle with musician Peter Loughran in 2012, with her ex revealing her reported $1 million per episode GOT salary when asking for spousal support. The exes share son Wylie, who was born in March 2010.

In 2015, Headey welcomed daughter Teddy with director and childhood friend Dan Cadan, whom she married in 2018.

Calling her time on GOT "life-changing," the five-time Emmy nominee told The Daily Beast in 2019, "With Cersei, it's been eight years, so that character is big in people's minds, and now it's over. That tiny TV show...I appreciate all that success, and if it brings with it the fact that people think that's it, I'm very happy to show them differently."

That same year she starred in the based-on-a-true-story wrestling dramedy Fighting With My Family and has since done a bunch of voice work and appeared in series including White House Plumbers and Beacon 23.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau was the lead of NBC's short-lived New Amsterdam before landing the role of dashing Kingslayer Jaime Lannister.

"I was like a little puppy when I arrived," Waldau said of joining the series, "and coming to Belfast, I just learned how to walk with pride and joy and I'm moving from this experience as a better person."

When it came time to say goodbye to the show, the Danish actor admitted he was surprised by how emotional he got. "I kept telling myself, listen, don't start getting all teary eyed. It's just a job, it's just a job, move on. And then they started talking and, I don't know," he told Esquire Singapore. "I think it's something…I got a bit of sand in my eye."

Since GOT, Coster-Waldau has appeared in films including The Silencing, Against the Ice and The Flash, and starred opposite Jennifer Garner in the 2023 Apple TV+ thriller The Last Thing He Told Me, which in March 2024 was renewed for a second season.

He primarily resides north of Copenhagen with his wife since 1998, Sascha Nukâka Motzfeldt, their two daughters and the family dogs.

After joining GOT as Brienne of Tarth in season two, Gwendoline Christie was surprised by the faction online that complained the 6-foot-3 actress was too pretty for the part as described in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books.

"Brienne really made me examine the parts of myself that I thought I needed to be concealed, that I felt society was telling me weren't good enough," she told Variety in 2019. "I was embarrassed to confront my androgyny, or my strength, or my masculinity, and what I felt about female empowerment and gender politics and the inconsistencies in my body and face. I was forced to confront all of those things to get into the character and that has been a great gift."

She's been acting regularly on stage (a National Theatre Production of A Midsummer's Night Dream) and screen (principal Larissa Weems on Tim Burton's Wednesday), but Christie has also become a reliably exciting presence on red carpets and in the front row during all the cities' Fashion Weeks.

Christie has been in a relationship with British fashion designer Giles Deacon since 2013 and he's created some of the gowns for her biggest red carpet moments over the years, calling her "a fantastic muse."

It's always the quiet ones, with John Bradley's clever, loyal and ultimately quite brave Samwell Tarley becoming one of GOT's guiding lights.

Since the show ended, the classically trained English actor has been on the British series Urban Myths and the Australian drama North Shore, as well as on Netflix's 3 Body Problem, the latest series from GOT creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

Bradley also appeared in the 2022 sci-fi thriller Moonfall with Halle Berry and Jennifer Lopez's rom-com Marry Me. 

"In terms of career, it’s a mark of approval that you can act," he told Oxford paper Cherwell of his time on GOT. "If people in charge of a show like that trust you with it, then in regard to the negativity it's just about shaking it off—it was such an all-consuming thing. Now we just want to show that we can do other things, but even if it’s the only thing you do in a career it’s still been a good career."

But he's been around the block enough to know, he added, "We were incredibly lucky to not have a single bad personality or toxic energy within the entire cast. That's rare."

Cultural phenomenons turned out to suit Nathalie Emmanuel, who broke out playing Daenerys' right-hand woman Missandei and ended up part of the Fast and Furious crew, starring in the past four films as hacktivist Ramsey.

The English actress also starred in the 2019 Four Weddings and a Funeral limited series on Amazon and is on the comedy Die Hart with Kevin Hart.

Emmanuel is part of the ensemble in the upcoming Francis Ford Coppola epic Megalopolis and stars in the John Woo action thriller The Killer (the director's remake of his own 1989 Hong Kong classic), streaming now on Peacock.

She has been dating British actor Alex Lanipekun since 2018.

Everyone called Richard Madden "the lovely Richard" on set, according to Turner, because the Scottish actor was just "so lovely." 

It turns out he was also so broke, revealing to Jimmy Fallon that he was living off just $5 a day before landing the role of Robb Stark, the doomed King in the North. "I had two options: I could either buy one meal, or a newspaper and a pint," he recalled. "It went the other way usually."

Madden admitted that the infamous 2013 "Red Wedding" episode, featuring many a demise, including Robb's, was "a horrible day" on set.

But, he went on to win a Golden Globe for his role in the hit Netflix series Bodyguard, and has appeared in major films, including the Elton John biopic Rocketman, the acclaimed World War I drama 1917 and the MCU ensemble flick The Eternals.

And regarding any off-screen stuff, "I just keep my personal life personal," he told the New York Times in 2019. "I've never talked about my relationships."

Alfie Allen's family isn't as complicated as Theon Greyjoy's, but they're pretty famous: mom's a producer, dad's an actor and sister is Lily Allen. (Which means brother-in-law is David Harbour.)

But after he landed his breakout role at 2022, Allen had to ban his older sibling from talking about GOT in public.

"I am not even allowed to mention the letters of what the show starts with," Lily said during a 2014 interview with Australian radio station Nova 969. "Alfie put me under strict orders."

While he's starred in series like Harlots and White House Farm and appeared on Broadway in Hangmen, Allen also turned in a chilling performance as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in the indie thriller McVeigh, which premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival.

Allen welcomed a daughter with partner Allie Teilz in October.

Jason Momoa stole the show as Dothraki warlord Khal Drogo, a man of very few words, and has been working pretty constantly since his one-and-done season on GOT.

He joined the DC Universe as Aquaman, appearing in a handful of movies, including his 2018 standalone blockbuster, which grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, and its pandemic-delayed 2023 sequel, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.

Momoa married longtime partner Lisa Bonet, with whom he shares daughter Lola Iolani (born in July 2007) and son Nakoa-Wolf (December 2008), in 2017, but the pair announced in 2022 that they were splitting up after 17 years together. Bonet filed for divorce in 2024.

Momoa confirmed in May 2024 via date night PDA that he's been seeing Adria Arjona.

For the latest breaking news updates, click here to download the E! News App