Kit Harington spoke to “Extra’s” Melvin Robert at the L.A. premiere of the new climate change series “Extrapolations.” He reflected on shining a light on such an important issue and the “complicated” conversations he’ll have to have with his children about the planet. He also revealed he’s seen a few episodes of the “Game of Thrones” prequel series “House of the Dragon,” though he confessed it’s hard for him to watch! Plus, he reacted to buzz about a possible Jon Snow spin-off series. “Extrapolations” is streaming on AppleTV+ March 17.

The actor didn’t address the Jon Snow sequel series in development, but he did talk about how the ending of Game of Thrones left his character.

Kit Harington did everything fans wanted him to do during his panel at the official Game of Thrones Convention Sunday night, just not the thing they really wished he would do, which was comment on the Jon Snow sequel series in development.

Harington remained mum on the subject. Moderators Jason Concepcion and Greta Johnsen didn’t broach the topic. Neither did the fans who lined up to ask questions during a Q&A. But the one thing Harington did talk about was where the ending of Game of Thrones left his character.

He began speaking about how the drama ended in 2019, with Jon killing Daenerys and being banished to live out his days on the Wall in the North. “I think if you asked him, he would’ve felt he got off lightly,” the actor said. “At the end of the show when we find him in that cell, he’s preparing to be beheaded and he wants to be. He’s done. The fact he goes to the Wall is the greatest gift and also the greatest curse.

“He’s gotta go back up to the place with all this history and live out his life thinking about how he killed Dany, and live out his life thinking about Ygritte [played by Rose Leslie] dying in his arms, and live out his life thinking about how he hung Olly [Brenock O’Connor], and live out his life thinking about all of this trauma, and that…” Harington paused for a brief moment. “That’s interesting,” he coyly emphasized.

“So I think where we leave him at the end of the show, there’s always this feeling of like… I think we wanted some kind of little smile that things are okay. He’s not okay,” he said.

So, yes, it’s not the official announcement fans might’ve been expecting, but it offers a glimpse into Harington’s headspace on the topic of Jon Snow’s life after the main story line.
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As the Game of Thrones star swaps furs for modern dress to play Shakespeare’s monarch, he reflects on what the play tells us about masculinity, and how it addresses the issues that drove his struggle with addiction

When some people found out Kit Harington was playing Henry V, he says, they immediately thought of Jon Snow, the courageous moral heart of HBO’s giant hit Game of Thrones. It is still Harington’s defining role – and there are a few superficial similarities: the leadership issues, the swords, the battle; Henry’s “band of brothers” and the Night’s Watch brotherhood in the TV series. But resurrecting Snow is “definitely not what we’re going for”, says Harington, who is 35. Snow is honourable and selfless; Henry is not.

Presented at the Donmar Warehouse in London, it’s a modern staging in “an alternate universe, if the monarchy were still in charge”. Harington was “very keen not to do swords”, he says with a smile, though he seems relaxed about carrying the weight of Snow’s furs, nearly three years after the show ended. “There’s an element of me always trying to get away from that comparison, but at the same time, you’re not going to, so why try? A large portion of the audience coming to this will be fans of that show, and that’s a great thing.”

We speak over Zoom, Harington at his house in London, some good art on the walls. He met his wife, the actor Rose Leslie, on Game of Thrones and they have a baby son. There seems to be a lightness to Harington, at odds with the pensiveness that his face tends to settle into, and he is quick to make fun of himself. At one point a woman – at first I think it’s Leslie, but he says it’s her sister, Portia, who is also an actor – brings him a coffee, and he laughs and says: “That looks like I have things brought to me.”

A couple of years ago, he went to talk to the Donmar’s artistic director, Michael Longhurst, about the possibility of him working there, and suggested the play. “The more I thought about what part I’d quite like to play,” he says … then immediately stops and adds “it’s a wonderful thing to have that choice”, wary of sounding arrogant. “But the more I thought about that play, and reread it, the more I thought, ‘That’s a really interesting one for our times.’”
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SPOILER WARNING: This story vaguely discusses a single scene in Marvel Studios’ “Eternals” that has been released by Disney, as well as a hypothetical future for Dane Whitman, Kit Harington’s character in the MCU.

After spending eight seasons as one of the leads on HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” Kit Harington decided to trade one massively popular cultural juggernaut for another, joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe in director Chloé Zhao’s “Eternals.”

Moving on from Jon Snow — the taciturn medieval warrior and erstwhile king of the North — Harington’s role in “Eternals” is Dane Whitman, a modern London bloke who happens to be dating Sersi (Gemma Chan), one of the titular Eternals, at the start of the film.

In the Marvel comics, however, Dane has more in common with Jon Snow — or, at least, a world of swords and sorcery — than Harington’s performance in “Eternals” would suggest. Dane’s family lineage stretches back to the medieval legend of King Arthur and the persona of the Black Knight, a warrior connected to the cursed Ebony Blade that bestows whoever wields it with terrific power — but at the cost of their sanity.

In the comics, Dane fights alongside the Avengers, and wrestles between heroism and villainy thanks to the cursed Ebony Blade. It’s no spoiler to note that none of that happens in “Eternals,” which casts Harington’s Dane as, in the actor’s words, “a good guy” — one of the only normal humans in a film otherwise concerned with ageless superheroes who first arrived on Earth roughly 7,000 years ago. Continue reading  »

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  »

Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow opens up to Gavanndra Hodge

There was a time, not so long ago, when Kit Harington, the brooding, battle-weary hero of the global television phenomenon Game of Thrones, considered giving up acting. He had spent eight gruelling seasons and nearly all his 20s playing Jon Snow, who, in the final episode of the show, has to kill Daenerys Targaryen, the woman he loves, because she has become an unhinged tyrant who thinks it’s OK to incinerate thousands of innocents with her massive dragons.

Harington wept at this scene during one of the cast read-throughs. “I cried a lot in the last season, just out of sheer fatigue,” he says. “But I was feeling pretty emotional that day. I think it was more to do with Emilia [Clarke, the actor who played Daenerys], more about the people around me and the story coming to an end.”

We are speaking in a photographic studio in Hoxton, the roast chicken that Harington’s assistant has fetched for his lunch cooling on the coffee table between us (“I can’t eat and talk”). He looks box-fresh, just like the black T-shirt, grey jeans rolled up to mid-calf and grey plimsolls he’s wearing; his shaggy beard is trimmed, his shoulder-length warrior ringlets shorn away.

It’s a little strange to meet someone and be surprised that they look like they’ve recently showered, but we’re more used to seeing Harington smeared with the roiling mud and blood of Westeros, so this general vibe of buffed well-being feels new, as does the laid-back grace with which he approaches being interviewed (in past encounters he has seemed rather tense and reserved – channelling Jon Snow a little too hard, perhaps).

It turns out that Harington, 33, has had a good lockdown. He and his wife, the actor Rose Leslie, who, as the wildling Ygritte, claimed Harington’s on-screen virginity in a thermal spring in season three of Game of Thrones, decamped from their north London home to their 15th-century house in Suffolk in March.

“I did not set myself the task of writing the next big novel or learning an instrument, and failing,” he says. “I gave myself a break from the get-go. I took the opportunity to reflect, to sit with myself, and for the most part that was what I achieved.” Continue reading  »