After playing the hero on “Game of Thrones,” Harington says he finds it “more interesting looking for the f—ed up people.”

Over the course of eight years, the world came to know Kit Harington as Jon Snow, the steadfast hero at the center of Game of Thrones’ dark world. Brave and honorable to his core, Snow fought to save his family and the realm from the forces of evil, even rising from the dead to vanquish an evil zombie army.

Five years after the show ended, Harington is now starring in a very different role. In fact, the only thing the characters have in common is that they both thrive in cold weather. In Rod Blackhurst’s Blood for Dust, a neo-Western crime thriller set in snowy Montana, Harington plays Ricky, a sociopathic drug-slinging arms dealer sporting a handlebar mustache and gold chain. He stars opposite Scoot McNairy, who plays Cliff, a down-on-his-luck salesman with a checkered past. When Cliff loses his job, his old colleague Ricky pulls him back into the criminal underbelly, selling drugs and guns for a cartel.

“He’s sort of a devil-on-the-shoulder character, the antagonist who’s with you all the way through,” Harington tells Entertainment Weekly of the role. “He’s like a good-time guy in a bad world. He doesn’t want to have to face reality.”

If Ricky sounds like the polar opposite of Jon Snow, that’s just how Harington wanted it. “I rarely get the opportunity to play the Rickys of this world, the antagonistic dirtbag types, and I was excited to be presented with that opposite an actor like Scoot,” he says. “So that was the kind of pull, and then Rod, the director, had such a clear idea of what he wanted to do and had it so well planned that I just felt very much in safe hands. It felt well put together. And then it’s all about growing a big old mustache and adopting a seriously American accent.”

While Ricky presented Harington with a unique type of villain to sink his teeth into, playing the bad guy has been appealing to him in the five years since Thrones concluded. “That is seemingly what I’ve been hunting a bit,” Harington concedes. “If I look at the roles I’ve taken since playing an out-and-out hero in Game of Thrones, I have to admit there seems to be some sort of pushback about playing a hero. I’m not so interested in heroic roles, and if I am, they have to be pretty anti-hero-ish.

“My heart goes out to people playing heroes,” he continues. “They’re f—ing hard to play and to make interesting. It is more fascinating as an actor, I think, to empathize with someone deeply faulted and wrong, to try and find your way into why they are doing these things. [Playing] a guy who is doing all the right things and is driven by being good, it’s harder to do that. And I think people who do it successfully, who play classically heroic roles, are very talented actors. But at the moment, I just find it more interesting looking for the f—ed-up people.”

Blood for Dust hits select theaters and digital on April 19. [Source]

Mark Gatiss’ adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle short story comes to BBC Two this Christmas, starring Kit Harington and Freddie Fox.

1881. Old College, Oxford plays host to three very different young academics: Abercrombie Smith (Kit Harington), a model of Victorian manhood, clean of limb and sound of mind; Monkhouse Lee (Colin Ryan), a delicate and unworldly student from Siam; and the strange and exotic Edward Bellingham (Freddie Fox), whose arcane research into Ancient Egypt is the talk of the campus. Could Bellingham’s unnatural experiments bring the breath of life to the horrifying bag of bones tagged Lot No.249?

An end-of-Empire chiller, Lot No. 249 stars Kit Harington, Freddie Fox, Colin Ryan, John Heffernan, James Swanton, Jonathan Rigby and Andrew Horton.

Watch A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No.249 on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer from 24 December at 10pm

Can you give an overview of Lot No. 249?

On the surface it’s a ripping old yarn about an Egyptian mummy terrorising an Oxford campus! Freddie Fox releases a murderous zombie and my character smells a rat and tries to stop him. But maybe once you release something like that… it can’t be put back in its box! It’s a really fun caper penned originally by Conan Doyle and made into a wonderfully scary and frightful Christmas ghost story by the marvellous Mark Gatiss.

Tell us about your character – Abercrombie Smith?

He plays with a straight bat! Very proper. Doesn’t want anything disturbing his world order. Doesn’t trust anything that’s not out of the text books of the time… he’ll stick to his phrenology and be done with it, thank you very much!

What was it like working with Mark Gatiss and your fellow cast members – Freddie Fox et al?

A dream. I have loved Gatiss and his work for a long time and I adore his series of Christmas ghost stories. Freddie is a great, kind, generous and brilliant actor. It was rapid and fun and that was what Mark promised me. Let’s get in, shoot something fun and sit around at Christmas with mince pies and watch it. What a joy.
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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  »