Kit Harington teases a “seismic shift” for Jon Snow, and Emilia Clarke discusses Dany’s dragons

TIME recently published a huge cover story all about Game of Thrones season 7. As part of its coverage, it sat down with stars Kit Harington (Jon Snow) and Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) to get their takes on how the early days of the show, what we can expect from season 7, and how they’re dealing with the end.

Clarke, always an animated presence, reminisced on the many parallels between herself and her character. “Ultimately, Daenerys’s main arc is the arc of a girl to a woman,” she said. “And then to a kind of woman who’s like, Wait a second! OK, I got here, I’m a big girl, but maybe I’m going to be a totally different person! Maybe I’m going to flip! Maybe I’m going to change my mind at the ripe old age of whatever.”

"And that’s really exciting because her changes have come at a point where I feel comfortable enough to explore them as a human being. It’s lovely but I get first-day-of-school jitters on the first day back every year. Every year I’m like, I’ve forgotten how to be Daenerys, I never knew how to anyway. That last season was terrible; I was awful! I’ve got to be better! So that never goes away."

Daenerys has been through a lot of grief over the course of the first six seasons, and Clarke thinks it’s been all worth it. (“I’ve said it a thousand times and I’ll say it again: People wouldn’t give two sh-ts about Daenerys if you didn’t see her suffer.”) Happily, she’s had help along the way. Jorah and Tyrion, Missandei and Grey Worm…many people have supported her on her journey from slave to queen. But to hear Clarke tell it, no one is closer to Daenerys than her dragons.

Heading into season 7, some fans have wondered if Daenerys might get together with Jon Snow, but Clarke thinks Dany has already found her soulmate. “You get a romantic couple onscreen, and chances are they’ve had sex,” she said. “Half of that reason is that as an actor, you’re convincing yourself you’re in love with that person. And there’s a little bit of you, maybe, that is, or whatever it is, if you’re single and attracted to each other!

"But there’s something about this maternal connection I had with the dragons from day [one]. I really got into Daenerys’s head, and the dragons are on so many levels the only children she’ll ever know. She has a huge amount of love to give, and all her family’s gone. She’s alone. There is no one character that has ever connected with her in a way that has left her feeling secure…The dragons are hers. With that essence in mind, it’s so much more a metaphorical idea that there’s that hole in your heart that needs to be filled and they do it. So it’s just this knee-jerk reaction that I have with them, where they are… as they’ve got bigger, and as she’s riding them, they are a physical part of her. And that in itself is empowering as f–k."

Next up, Kit Harington sounds off on how both Jon Snow and his approach to playing Jon Snow have changed since season 1. “I think I was picked to be Jon Snow because there’s quite a lot of me in Jon Snow. When I read it on the paper, I knew there was something in it like me.”

"there were times early on where I felt what I was doing with the character was wrong. I made mistakes and felt that he wasn’t interesting enough. That sounds weird, but I’ve never been quite content with him. Maybe that’s what makes him him. That angst. He could be a bit too morose, he didn’t quite go there emotionally. But once you’ve made those choices, that character is that character. You just look like an actor wanting to change the character if you then go back and betray what your first instincts were. So I’m more happy with Jon than I’ve ever been before. This year there is this huge seismic shift where all of what he’s learned over the years, suddenly… He’s still the same Jon, but he grows up.”"

And there’s a huge seismic shift where everything Jon’s learned suddenly what, Kit Harington? SUDDENLY WHAT?

Obviously, Harington isn’t going to let that cat out of the bag, but it was touch and go for a second there. The actor also gave us some unique insight into what it’s like to act on a show as overpoweringly HUGE as Game of Thrones.

"The background has to be in exactly the right place, the smoke has to be the right level, the light has to be right — there’s a hundred things that have to be right. At any one moment, the take could not work, because of any of those elements. It’s exactly like shooting Lord of the Rings. Any big, epic movie would be like that. And it’s a different way of acting where it can get very frustrating, but you have to zone out the background noise a bit."

Of course, there are plenty of smaller scenes on Game of Thrones that don’t require that kind of approach, but it’s a good skill for Harington to have, especially if he plans to do more Hollywood work after the show is over.

The subject of the end of the show is a touchy one for people in the cast — Harington tried to say his goodbyes this year, “so next year I can just do my job and get the f–k out.” He seems more curious about how the whole thing will end.

"I had certain theories and things up until this last year, so many theories. As a group of people, we do theorize a lot; long hours in the green room. I am so excited to receive next year’s scripts, because I genuinely have no idea. [For my performance,] I shouldn’t be trying to endgame. He doesn’t know the end, I don’t know the end — he’s living it bit by bit. But I can’t wait to read it."

And we can’t wait to see it.

Next: Crosstalk: Do we want Jon Snow and Daenerys to get together?

Other interesting stuff:

• Harington had quite a bit to say about how Game of Thrones does and doesn’t reflect the real world. He also bemoaned how climate change seemed to effect the old locations. “We went to Iceland to find snow, because winter is here. We got there and we were lucky to get the snow we did, because in our world, winter is definitely not here. It’s this weird parallel the opposite parallel. We go out there this year, and the glacier that me and Rose [Leslie] filmed on four years ago, I saw it and it has shrunk. I saw climate change and global warming with my own eyes, and it is terrifying.”
• Clarke weighed in on the nude scenes she did during the first season of the show: “I don’t have any qualms saying to anyone it was not the most enjoyable experience. How could it be? I don’t know how many actresses enjoy doing that part of it. And I don’t think that it was an active, ‘I’m never going to take my clothes off choice.’ It’s just a thing where, the roles that came up and the show itself has unfolded in a way where she no longer does that. Where you want to draw parallels as a character, with Daenerys’s strength in keeping her clothes, is kind of obvious.”

You can read the full interviews with Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke here and here, respectively.