Emilia Clarke wasn’t the only Game of Thrones cast member who had strong feelings about her character Daenerys being killed in the final episode by her lover Jon Snow, who put a knife in her heart while embracing her. Kit Harington spoke to Entertainment Weekly as well about where Jon’s mind was in his final scene with Dany and why he thinks that Game of Thrones isn’t sexist in the way it treated Daenerys and Cersei in its last two episodes.

Clarke and Harington revealed to Entertainment Weekly that Harington hadn’t read the final episode’s script before the cast’s table read. When the moment Jon killed Dany came up, “I looked at Emilia and there was a moment of me realizing, ‘No, no…’” Harington said, and Clarke nodding back sadly ‘yes.’

“He was crying,” Clarke said. “And then it was kind of great him not having read it.”

Harington said this wasn’t a happy ending for Jon; it was a tragedy. “This is the second woman he’s fallen in love with who dies in his arms and he cradles her in the same way,” Harington said. “That’s an awful thing. In some ways, Jon did the same thing to [his Wilding lover] Ygritte by training the boy who kills her. This destroys Jon to do this.”

Harington knew some people wouldn’t be happy with the show’s final episode and Dany’s fate. “I think it’s going to divide,” he said. “But if you track her story all the way back, she does some terrible things. She crucifies people. She burns people alive. This has been building. So, we have to say to the audience: ’You’re in denial about this woman as well. You knew something was wrong. You’re culpable, you cheered her on.’”

He also doesn’t believe the show was sexist, killing off two of its strongest women. “One of my worries with this is we have Cersei and Dany, two leading women, who fall,” he said. “The justification is: Just because they’re women, why should they be the goodies? They’re the most interesting characters in the show. And that’s what Thrones has always done. You can’t just say the strong women are going to end up the good people. Dany is not a good person. It’s going to open up discussion but there’s nothing done in this show that isn’t truthful to the characters. And when have you ever seen a woman play a dictator?” [Source]