Bran Stark is coming back to “Game of Thrones” — quite literally in a big way.

The second-youngest of the Stark children was off-screen for the entirety of Season 5. But he wasn’t inactive. While his older sisters Arya and Sansa were training with the Faceless Men and Littlefinger, respectively, the Three-Eyed Raven was teaching him how to be a “greenseer” in a cave north of the Wall.

Entertainment Weekly confirmed this week that Bran will be returning to the show in Season 6, which debuts this spring. The magazine also revealed a first glimpse of the new Bran. He looks very different than he did before — taller and leaner, with shorter hair. Which makes sense, given that Isaac Hempstead-Wright, the actor who plays him, is 16 years old.

In a separate article in Entertainment Weekly, Hempstead-Wright also provided some tantalizing clues about what Bran will be doing in Season 6. As many suspected, he’s going to use his powers to look into the past and future of the world of the show.

“Now we’re given looks into very important events in the past, present and future of this world and Bran is beginning to piece them together like a detective, almost as if he’s watching the show,” Hempstead-Wright said. “Equally, he’s now discovering how crucial he could be in the Great War. It’s quite ‘Inception’-y.”

The comparison to “Inception” is confusing. There was no time travel in Christopher Nolan’s movie. The characters were exploring dreams. So it’s possible that Hempstead-Wright misunderstood or misremembered the movie.

But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt for a moment. Maybe he’s referring to the process that gives “Inception” its name — by which the lead characters implant new thoughts into dreamers’ minds. If that’s the case, perhaps Bran will travel back in time and deliver a message to past people in order to change the course of history. There’s already been speculation that he does something like that in a sample chapter from the upcoming Winds of Winter. And it would certainly be a way for him to play a “crucial” role in the Great War.

For more fascinating quotes from Hempstead-Wright, head over to Entertainment Weekly.

Also on HuffPost:

– This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.