Bran's back!In the second episode of Game of Thrones: Season 6, the most magically-inclined Stark (at least on the show) makes his grand return. Bran took Season 5 off as he trained north of the Wall with the Three-Eyed Raven, portrayed this season by Max Von Sydow.

Isaac Hempstead-Wright and Max Von Sydow on Game of Thrones

When we meet Bran again, he's going to be much more powerful than when he left off at the end of Season 4. But just how integral is he to Game of Thrones' biggest conflicts? When I sat down with Isaac Hempstead-Wright to learn what's ahead for Bran in Season 6, he teased just what we'll be seeing in Bran's visions and why Bran and the Night's King come face-to-face.Read on for what Hempstead-Wright had to say. This interview has been edited and condensed.

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Isaac Hempstead-Wright and Max Von Sydow on Game of Thrones

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Thank you!It was weird not to be going to the weird-old extended family of Game of Thrones for a year. Especially watching it on TV, it was sad seeing everyone else going off and doing their thing and having fun in Belfast and doing all the press, and there I was like, "Oh, I actually really wish I was with you guys."[laughs] That's a good point.Yeah, [Bran's] been on Dagobah.Bran is a changed character when you meet him. I mean, he's still Bran, but he's been chasing his destiny for the entire series, and he's been going through all these kind of intense, adverse situations every five minutes, whether it's kidnapping by Craster's Keep or then having to fight off a hoard of zombies, and than having to send his brother away and then Jojen getting blown away by a fireball.Now he's finally got here, and he's stuck in this cave with this Raven, who's been calling him pretty much since episode 2 of the first season, and now he's got to learn how to master these powers that have been hinted at the whole way through the series. He's gotten better and better at them, but he's never really had much of an idea how he could control them or what they might even be useful for. The Three-Eyed Raven's job throughout Season 5 offscreen was to train Bran and show him exactly what these are and what he can do with them. So when we meet Bran in Season 6, he's still training, but he's good enough to show us some particularly interesting glimpses into the past maybe, and also some other things.Oh, wow. I mean, reading the scripts and seeing them I'm like -- because we're off-book as well, this is new, new, new. It's stuff that you then read and go, "Aaah!" It's beginning to tie things up and weave a path through the kind of sprawling mass of storylines that are Game of Thrones.Yeah, I think so.Oh, it's so cool, isn't it?I feel a little bit like Bran's kind of watching the show along with us. He's got an idea of what's happening throughout the whole kingdom. I don't think he's a very vengeful character. He's kind of got to rise above it and just look at the wider picture of everything that's happening and the dead coming and everything south and basically how the whole kingdom is about to suddenly implode under its own kind of anarchic system... I think there's some interesting to come in the coming season which will reveal exactly what the relationship between those two mystical characters -- the Three-Eyed Raven and the Night's King -- is. That's something that'll be cool.Yeah, I think so. It was so cool in Season 4 to finally meet these creatures, because they're really like a high level of mythical. They're like Rayquaza in Pokemon.

Game of Thrones airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz