In true Jon-Snow-pouting-mournfully-out-over-the-wall fashion, Kit Harington says the last season of Game of Thrones was grueling and he is done, done, DONE!
In fact, Harington sounds like he’s being a bit playfully dramatic in his over-the-top comments to GQ Australia about the final season:
“The last season of Thrones,” he says, “seemed to be designed to break us”.
Filming on eight concluding episodes of the show, due to broadcast shortly, was brutal and demanding. For those on the cast who’d been there, like Harington, since the start, the final nine months of shooting was basically a form of aversion therapy.
“Everyone was broken at the end. I don’t know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending or if we were crying because it was so fucking tiring. We were sleep deprived. It was like it was designed to make you think, Right, I’m fucking sick of this. I remember everyone walking around towards the end going, ‘I’ve had enough now. I love this, it’s been the best thing in my life, I’ll miss it one day – but I’m done.’”
Somebody has been texting with Richard Madden about how great it is to appear in a hit TV show where you get to wear t-shirts instead of tailored IKEA rugs and you don’t have to stand around in half-frozen mud for hours at a time! Just a 9-to-5 job working on the West End, that’s what he wants:
“I think people who don’t work in film or TV don’t realise quite how disorientating it is,” Harington says, “being away from home all the time. Coming here today [to the hotel], and seeing all the people cycling in to work, it seemed in my head a real luxury. Which must sound mad. But the process of going to work, having a day with your colleagues, coming back to your family, cooking, having stuff in the fridge… It sounds odd to say but it’s the thing I’m looking forward to most. After nine years I’ll be at home. In one place. Static.”
This was around the time he described his satchel as, “Such a fucking actor’s bag, this,” so I think we can assume a certain amount of self-awareness.
Harington was never how I pictured Jon Snow when originally reading the books, but he has gradually won me over with his youthful McDonald’s brawling and utter embrace of his character’s most emo tendencies and good-natured willingness to occasionally play them for laughs. Congratulations on your long-awaited forthcoming haircut, Kit.