Game of Thrones enthusiasts have tried all sorts of ways to determine the true main character of the sprawling HBO fantasy drama. There’s only one measure, though, that reveals which character has been given the most attention: screen time.
Game of Thrones enthusiasts have tried all sorts of ways to determine the true main character of the sprawling HBO fantasy drama. There’s only one measure, though, that reveals which character has been given the most attention: screen time.
Armed with a stopwatch, someone timed every single scene in all seven seasons of Game of Thrones and ranked each character by the amount of time they’ve appeared in the camera frame. By the slimmest of margins, Jon Snow is now the king of screen time following Sunday night’s season finale, according to the user ninewheels0 on TV and film reference website IMDb.
Join 500,000+ readers who start their day with Quartz.
By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Jon (or do we need to call him Aegon now?) has appeared on screen for 338 minutes (5.63 hours), surpassing Tyrion Lannister by just one minute. Daenerys Targaryen comes in third at 276 minutes, with Sansa Stark and Cersei Lannister rounding out the top five.
Rounding to the nearest quarter of a minute, ninewheels0, who’s performed a similar analysis for Marvel superhero and Harry Potter films, ranked 200 different characters in Game of Thrones. Some results were quite surprising:
Here is the ranking of every character with more than five minutes of screen time (an asterisk denotes a character no longer living; for a list of even more characters, visit IMDb):
