Were you expecting to die?

I wasn’t expecting to even come back for Season 8, so the fact that I got to come back and die, and with the death I got, it was insane. I’m very, very grateful for that. I was shocked, in a good way.

What kind of direction did Miguel Sapochnik give you for your fight scene?

We talked about how it was like someone had removed Lyanna’s fear gene. Like fear wasn’t even an option for her. Even though she’s being faced with possibly the most terrifying thing of her life, she’s not fazed by it. She knows what she has to do. She could have easily stayed on the floor, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to do that. She wanted to make a difference.

It looked quite painful.

Oh, yes. When you watch it back, you can hear him crushing her ribs. But I think her adrenaline got her through it. She was in a lot of pain, but at that moment, her aim was to kill the giant. The way I thought about it, she was taking her last breath to do this. It was her final moment before he squeezed her to death.

The behind-the-scenes footage suggested that you didn’t really get to interact with Ian Whyte, who played the giant. That you were held up by a claw-like crane?

Yeah, I was in a massive claw machine. The machine was like a robot, I guess. It had a series of moves, to shake me about and make it look like I was being lifted up by a giant. That was really cool. The dragonglass dagger, I had to stick it into this green polystyrene plastic ball, which would be the giant’s eye, and it was quite funny, because the dagger was quite floppy! [Laughs] Sometimes it just fell on the floor, and then we’d have to pick it up again. The polystyrene ball, too, had these little squares cut out, and I had to get it in between the squares, so it was quite technical, actually. But we got it there in the end. Ian and I didn’t interact, but I did meet him. He was very, very, very tall. I never felt that small in my whole life.