During their eight-season run on HBO, Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff had a habit of playing pranks on the cast and crew. Not only did they prank Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and Maisie Williams (Arya Stark) during season 1, they also got one over on Kit Harington (Jon Snow) that left him quaking.

Kit Harington believed he would have to play Jon Snow disfigured and bald

According to Business Insider, Weiss and Benioff got Harington good while shooting the eighth episode of season 1 titled “The Pointy End.” The producers convinced Harington that Jon Snow was going to suffer horrible burns. They told him that it would destroy his hair and disfigure his face, which meant hours in the makeup chair for the rest of the series.

GOT writer and producer Bryan Cogman wrote in his book Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones: Season 1 & 2 that the aired version of the episode featured Jon Snow setting a wight on fire at Castle Black to protect Lord Commander Mormont (James Cosmo).

But Weiss and Benioff sent Harington a fake version of the script. In the scene they gave Harington, Jon Snow pulls burning drapes from a fire and throws them at the wight. The fire proceeds to engulf them both with Mormont exclaiming, “Gods boy. I was wrong about you. You’re a ranger, through and through.”

The fake scene ended with the line, “Jon smiles, his teeth shining brightly in his destroyed face. Mormont, sickened, has to look away.”

Kit and Rose are expecting their first child together.

Leslie revealed the news and showed off her growing belly in a cover story and photoshoot for the summer 2020 issue of UK’s Make Magazine, which was published on Saturday.

I can’t be more happy with this new and want to say congrats to both. Hoping you the best!

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.”

I am so happy! Just one day more to watch Kit on his new project, Criminal. It is going to be short but I am so happy to finally get something new.

I have added some stills of Kit Harington from Criminal UK: Season 2 to the gallery. Don’t forget to watch and support Kit.