Conor McGregor rules the UFC, and now he is set to expand his kingdom with a star turn on “Game of Thrones.”
McGregor, 28, will make an appearance in one of the two remaining seasons of the hit HBO show, according to Northern Ireland newspaper The Sunday Life.
“It’s been agreed that McGregor will appear in one of the remaining two seasons of ‘Game of Thrones,'” an unnamed source said, according to Belfast Live. “He was headhunted as it were by HBO, as one of the ‘Game of Thrones’ directors is a huge UFC fan. They believed that he would be a perfect fit for the show.”
This isn’t the first time that McGregor’s been linked to the bloody epic. In October 2015, McGregor posted a video of himself sparring with the 6-foot-9-inch Icelandic strongman Hafþór Júlíus “Thor” Björnsson, who plays Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane on “GoT.”
While details of McGregor’s appearance on the show remain sketchy, it would not be hard for him to get to the set. “GoT” often films in and around Dublin, Ireland, which just so happens to be McGregor’s hometown.
McGregor’s future has been up in the air since he destroyed lightweight champion Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 at Madison Square Garden in November. The win made McGregor the first fighter in UFC history to hold two titles at the same time, although he subsequently relinquished the featherweight belt at the behest of the UFC.
After the fight with Alvarez, McGregor announced that he was expecting a child with his longtime partner, Dee Devlin, and rumors have swirled that he’ll take an extended break following a furious fight schedule that saw him enter the cage six times in the past two years.
It is not yet clear what McGregor will do during his time off, although speculation about a long-rumored boxing match with Floyd Mayweather bubbled up again last week when it was revealed that McGregor was granted a license to box in California.
If McGregor eschews the Mayweather super-fight in favor of “GoT,” he’ll be following in the footsteps of a number of UFC stars who have traded in their fight gloves for the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. Randy Couture starred in “The Expendables” series alongside Sylvester Stallone, Gina Carano played the lead in Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire,” and, most famously, Ronda Rousey had cameos in the recent “Entourage” movie and “Furious 7.”