[WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW FOR THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF VIKINGS]

Fans of History’s Vikings are in mourning after the shocking events of Season 3’s sixth episode, titled Born Again, which saw the death of fan favorite character Athelstan (George Blagden) at the hands of Floki (Gustaf Skarsgård). The morning after the episode aired, we were given the opportunity to catch up once again with actor George Blagden, via a conference call with journalists, so he could walk us through the grieving process firsthand.

On the reaction to the death and how he personally has handled the experience:

“I have to admit the emotional process of it all was fascinating for me. From finding out, to getting on set realizing it would be the last time that I would be on that island and not letting anyone else know about that. The other actors actually didn’t know until after we had started shooting Season 3. It was that kind of secretive. And then of course wrapping on the show, I burst into tears. They had this big surprise for my last scene.

I think it’s just very emotional when you’re working in our industry with a group of people that you get that close to – with episodic television – over a number of years it kind of becomes like family. So yeah, anyone that says an actor when their character is killed off in a show, it’s not an emotional experience, I think they’re probably lying. [laughs]

But I’ve been biting my fingers since I left the show in August last year. I just hope we did lovely Athelstan justice.”

On what he thought of the emotional eulogy Ragnar (Travis Fimmel) gave at the end of the episode:

“You had to ask me didn’t you? Yeah, I welled up. You know, it’s amazing on shows like this, you read the script, you see what all the other characters will have to film, of course you’re not there on the day they are doing it. So you just see the scene, you know when it’s being shot and you imagine, ‘Oh okay, Travis is off doing that somewhere.’

I didn’t even know where they were filming it, and then coming to watch the episode through to the end, seeing Travis climbing that hill and realizing it was the same place we had the prayer together at the end of Season 2 and this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful performance from Travis… it sort of sent me over the edge. It was really lovely. Really, really lovely to watch as a kind of rounding off for the whole episode.

Yeah, really amazing. I think it’s quite rare when you’re in something to be that affected. I’m sure lots of people that you talk to in the industry who are actors and involved in things, probably talk a lot about how it’s quite hard to look at things objectively because you’re so close to them. So when you are able to just be sucked in, be emotionally affected by something you were actually involved in, I think it speaks volumes on how powerful it is. It is an amazing thing what Travis did.”

We’ll have the full interview up next week, but we wanted to share these quote with our readers, in hopes that they’ll help with the closure as we say goodbye to Athelstan.

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History’s Vikings airs Thursday nights at 10pm ET only on History.