Almost all Game of Thrones fans have watched Season 5 by now and are looking forward to new Season 6 episodes of the HBO show.

Filming for Season 6 has started this month and thousands of fans answered casting calls at the show's filming locations in Spain, supposedly for battle scenes involving Daenerys Targaryen, according to UK website The Independent.

Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys and received Emmy nominations for her recent work, has raved about the next season in an interview with TV review website Collider:

"Next season, I've said this before, but there's a lot of season where you need to (rightly so) kind of need to set the scene. And you have a couple of episodes where you're like, 'OK, feeding information, I get it. We're finding out about this person. And we know about that person. And oh, there's that person.' But this season coming up, that we're about to film, there's none of that. It's just go, go, go, go. Shocking moment to shocking moment. Epic moment to epic moment. It's mental; it's epic."

The show's scriptwriters make quite a few changes to George R.R. Martin's novels in adapting them for television, as revealed by actor Iain Glen in his interview with UK's RadioTimes, so it stands to reason that they are planning to pick up the action pace and pack the next season full of twists and turns.

The debate over whether Jon Snow will return doesn't seem like it will abate anytime soon, especially now that actor Kit Harington has been spotted at Belfast airport in Northern Ireland where filming for the next season is taking place, Vanity Fair reported.

Other hopefuls have pointed out that HBO's recently announced "In Memoriam" sale of merchandise via its website - which incuded items from Oberyn Martel, The Hound, Khal Drogo, Stannis Baratheon, Tywin Lannister, Joffrey Baratheon, Ned Stark, Robb Stark, and Ygritte - did not include merchandise from Jon Snow, one of the show's more popular characters.

Regardless of the outcome, death is a fact of life in the Game of Thrones universe, and Season 6 should have more than a few tricks up its sleeve to surprise fans. And whether director David Nutter lied when he told President Obama that Jon Snow was "deader than dead" is just one of those mysteries.