Early in March 2015, shortly before Game of Thrones returned for its fifth season, David Benioff sat at a table in the Oxford Union’s 200 year-old debating chambers, trying to repress a smirk.

He was flanked by stars Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and John Bradley (Samwell Tarley) and fellow showrunner DB Weiss. They’d been on stage some 70 minutes discussing the series and taking questions from the floor. Now, with the hour late, a woman near the front asked if actors ever protested upon learning their Game of Thrones character was to be killed off.

“Before we deliver the scripts…we make a phonecall,” said Benioff, smiling. “Usually people are quite gracious. This year, for the first time, we got some pushback. 'Are you sure?'. And we said, 'yeah…we’re quite sure you are going to die this year.' There was a long conversation and we [received] a long letter explaining this was a bad idea, which just made us want to kill that person much more.”

Benioff tried not to laugh. But his relish was unmistakable. He didn’t identify the ticked-off thesp. It later emerged that it was the veteran Belfast actor Ian McElhinney, who had been hugely discombobulated to discover his character, Ser Barristan Selmy, was to die in a bloody ambush.