'Game of Thrones' season 7 release date, news: Iain Glen says the upcoming season is taking as long as 10 episodes to film

When the sixth season ended, "Game of Thrones" showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss made it known that they wanted to wrap up the show with 13 episodes spread across the final seasons: seven episodes for season 7; six for the eighth season.

While that sounds painfully short for fans of the series, Iain Glen, the actor playing Ser Jorah Mormont, recently told RadioTimes.com that the length of the upcoming season wouldn't impact the quality of the show. In fact, he said the filmmakers were spending as much time filming the seven episodes for season 7 as they would for a 10-episode season.

"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. 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 stated.

Glen confirmed that there would only be 13 episodes left, but interestingly, he also mentioned that there were 15 hours left in the show. Perhaps some of the episodes would be longer than an hour. The Daily Star also noted that there may be a couple of two-hour specials. Furthermore, Glen revealed that characters would be overlapping more than usual next season, so they would be sharing more screen time together.

Glen was also asked if Jorah would be in season 8, but he said he's not sure if his character would make it into the final season. After all, no one is safe in "Game of Thrones." Jorah has been around since the first season of the show.

"Game of Thrones" season 7 is scheduled to premiere sometime in summer 2017 on HBO.