Since laying down his sword in Game of Thrones, Kit Harington has been fighting other battles. He tells Charlotte Edwardes about surviving alcohol addiction and depression — and the first fatiguing months of fatherhood
Every morning, shortly before he wakes up his six-month-old baby, Kit Harington rings his mother to express thanks, such is the revelatory insight he now has into parenthood. And, yes, it’s also for help when he gets the baby out of his crib, but, mostly, “I can’t believe I took them for granted like that. I look at our boy and I’m, like, ‘I’m never going to get the thanks that I deserve for changing all these nappies and looking after you!’ ” The baby — Harington and his wife, the actress Rose Leslie, do not wish to make his name public— was born at University College Hospital in London in January. Harington has a phobia of needles and fainted at one antenatal, so no, he did not cut the cord. “I’m a real wimp when it comes to blood and pain.” His impression of the event is still his profound shock: “I remember saying over and again, ‘It’s a baby. It’s a baby. It’s a baby.’ ”
Fatherhood and marriage are central to Harington’s new life. Sober for two-and-a-half years following a stint in rehab, it’s a life for which he is very grateful — although cautiously so because sobriety is a fragile thing.
He feels settled now; retreating on the horizon is a period so dark he thought about taking his own life. It’s a period that overlapped with the last days of Jon Snow, the Game of Thrones character he played for a decade to an audience so fanatical that 19.3 million watched the finale. Life is “wonderful”, he says. “I have a child and my relationship is brilliant … I’m a very, very happy, content, sober man.”
But his expression throughout the first chat we have for this interview remains disconcertingly one of a very solemn, tortured, sober man. He struggles to get comfortable in his “too-short shorts”, and then he struggles with the light being too bright outside the window of his hotel room in humid upstate New York, but most of all he struggles with my questions, deciding at one point, “Yeah, I am talking shit.” Perhaps it’s the four publicists sitting in on our Zoom conversation, which seems extra even in this Britney Spears era. They insist they won’t interfere (they do). They have prepped me that he’ll talk about rehab, family, and work. But Harington gives short closed answers until I feel as agonised in his company as he apparently does. Continue reading »