Ed Sheeran will star on the upcoming seventh season of ‘Game of Thrones’ because Maisie Williams is a huge fan.

The ‘Castle on the Hill’ hitmaker agreed to appear on the show after creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff approached him as a surprise for star Maisie Williams, who plays Arya Stark and is a huge fan of Ed’s.

Speaking at a South by Southwest panel for the show, David Benioff explained: “For years, we tried to get Ed Sheeran on the show to surprise Maisie, and this year we finally did it.”

No details of Ed’s role have been released but the upcoming season of the show will have its world premiere on Sunday, July 16, 2017.

And Weiss and Benioff also revealed at SXSW that the eighth season of ‘Game of Thrones’ will only have six episodes.

Meanwhile, Kit Harington, who stars as Jon Snow in the hit HBO fantasy drama, recently declared that series seven has “more ambition” than previous seasons.

He said: “Season seven has much more ambition. It’s much grander. There are less episodes this year, so they spent more money on those episodes. So, the whole scale of it is up.”

The upcoming season will feature seven episodes instead of the regular 10, and will pave the way for the show to come to an end when it reaches season eight.

And Kit believes ‘GoT’- which is based on George R. R. Martin’s novel series ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ – needs to go out “with a bang” when it does close its doors for good.

He added: “That has to happen at the end of Thrones, this season and next season. It has to go into places TV hasn’t been.”