'Game of Thrones' season 7 release date, latest news: Penultimate season to be 'more extraordinary', according to Iain Glen

HBO's highly-acclaimed high fantasy series "Game of Thrones" is set to return this year for its seventh season.

The upcoming season has a shorter episode order than any of its previous seasons — seven episodes instead of the usual 10. However, filming lesser episodes does not mean spending a lesser amount of production time in completing season 7. In fact, one of the show's actors hinted that the show will be bigger and more epic than it ever was before.

Speaking to Radio Times, cast member Iain Glen, who portrays the character Jorah Mormont, mentioned that the production team is allotting as much time on the forthcoming seven episodes as they ordinarily would when they filmed 10 episodes in order to get season 7 just right.

"They are taking the length of time it takes to shoot ten episodes to shoot just seven this year and six next year," Glen revealed to Radio Times. "There are fifteen more hours left in Thrones as we understand it, but that may change, but that's as far as we know," the actor went on to say.

Glen also added, "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."

On whether his character will remain alive until the very last season of the show, Glen admitted that he was not certain if he will be making it to the show's eighth season. However, he also shares that as the series moves towards its end game, more characters will be overlapping "in the same scenes" and are headed "to the same places."

The seven-episode "Game of Thrones" season 7 commenced production in September last year, and it is expected to finish filming sometime in mid-February. According to the Huffington Post, given that filming the much-shorter season 7 will be taking five months to complete, the usual amount of time spent filming all other seasons of the series, HBO will have the opportunity to ensure that the final product will be much more impressive.

The upcoming seventh season of "Game of Thrones" is likely to be broadcasted sometime in the summer.