Winter is coming … this summer. Game of Thrones star Iain Glen recently told Radio Times the showrunners are taking more time to complete season seven of the HBO series.

The upcoming season will be the second to last for the fantasy drama, which stars Peter Dinklage, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Lena Headey, Kit Harington, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Isaac Hempstead-Wright, and Emilia Clarke.

According to Glen, showrunners David Benioff and Daniel Weiss are taking the same amount of time to complete seven episodes that they normally would for 10:

They are taking the length of time it takes to shoot ten episodes to shoot just seven this year and six next year. There are fifteen more hours left in Thrones as we understand it, but that may change, but that’s as far as we know.”

Glen said the season is taking longer because the sets and stories are more ambitious:

I think the scale and size of the set pieces, the world that is being created it’s just getting more and more extraordinary and they feel they need that time to shoot seven hours as opposed to ten.”

He later added that season seven more characters overlapping:

This season you feel that the drama is moving towards its end game, more characters are overlapping so we are seeing a lot more of each other, than perhaps in the past. In the same scenes and we are going to the same places.”

The new season of Game of Thrones is expected to debut on HBO in summer 2017.

What do you think? Do you watch Game of Thrones? Are you excited for the new season?