Entertainment Weekly explores HBO’s year-long quest to keep Jon Snow’ revival secret

This week, Entertainment Weekly’s cover story is all about Kit Harington, Jon Snow, and HBO’s ambitious plan to keep people from finding out that Game of Thrones would be bringing both back following Jon Snow’s murder at the end of the show’s fifth season. (The story is available online, but only to subscribers—EW has been releasing bits of it throughout the week.) After a year of dodging questions about whether Jon Snow was dead or alive, Kit Harington finally sat down for a long interview and cleared everything up.

Harington started by telling the story of how he found out Jon Snow would be coming back. When he received the scripts for Season 5, Jon Snow’s death scene seemed pretty final, and it wasn’t until shooting on Season 6 began that showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss took him aside and laid things out. Said Benioff:

"Me and Dan, we know this, a couple producers know this, and George knows this. Now you’re going to know this — and you can’t tell anybody. Not your mom, not your dad, not your family — not anybody. You can’t tell anybody…You are back next season. You are alive. Melisandre brings you back. And you’ve got a s—load to do next season. You’re going to be doing a lot."

First of all, it’s noteworthy that “George knows this.” At this point in the series, Game of Thrones has deviated a lot from George R.R. Martin’s books, but it seems like this is one area where it’ll stay true to them, even if the pertinent ones haven’t been published yet.

Second of all, it’s surprising to hear that Jon Snow will have “a s—load to do” in Season 6. For one thing, that makes HBO’s cover-up efforts even more impressive, and for another, that means the show will have to pack an extra lot of Jon Snow action into the remaining eight episodes, since he spent the first two as a corpse.

From there, it was a long hard process of lying like crazy to everyone. Harington let a few people in on the secret (his family, girlfriend Rose Leslie), but he had to put on a show for most of the cast and crew, something he found very difficult. That was particularly true after his “final” scene on the show, when he was called upon to address the crowd. “I had to do a fake goodbye speech,” Harington said. “It was awful. It was like being at my own funeral.”

For the record, not everyone believed Harington’s story. A quick rundown:

• Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark): Totally bought it. Wrote Harington a long letter about how much she enjoyed working with him.
• David Nutter (directed Jon Snow’s death scene): Had no clue. Apparently he roused the actors playing the Night’s Watch mutineers by reading them the Night’s Watch vows before shooting, which is awesome. Also, that means he didn’t lie to President Obama when he asked about Jon Snow’s death. That could have been bad.
• Gwendoline Christie (Brienne): Was skeptical. “When you have an actor like Kit Harington, who’s as sensational and as visually arresting as him, that’s something you don’t get rid of too quickly.”
• Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth): Didn’t buy it for a second. “He told me to f—off from the start,” Harington said.

Next came the ten-month period between seasons. Harington, who wasn’t comfortable lying all the time, asked his publicist not to book him on interviews, but that didn’t stop the media from picking over every little thing he did, right down to whether or not he was getting his hair cut. Once the Season 6 scripts came out and people involved with the production knew Jon would be back, the mandate to lie—or at least be sneaky with the truth—spread to the rest of the cast. They figured that they could tell interviewers that Jon Snow was dead with “an honest heart,” as Maisie Williams (Arya) put it. Apparently, no one asked the right question: was he going to stay dead?

Everyone was able to maintain the ruse for a while, but late in 2015, a photograph of Harington on set and in costume finally came out. Said showrunner Dan Weiss:

"If you look around online you’re going to see Kit in a field, with a sword in his hand, surrounded by 300 extras, and you’re going to say he’s probably not dead. Unless we’re shooting a weirdly expensive flashback sequence to a battle that Jon was never in. Thankfully, the vast majority of people don’t troll around online looking for things that are going to f—up their viewing experience. So there [were] still large numbers of people wondering, ‘Is he or isn’t he?’"

As someone who trolls around online looking for things that are going to f— up my viewing experience, I knew about the leak, but really, considering that Harington had “more shooting days than ever before” this year, it’s a miracle that only one photo got out there.

Now, everyone is looking forward to seeing what’s next for the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch. Harington has talked about how death has changed Jon Snow, and promises big things for the character in Season 6. “It’s the biggest season for him so far. There’s one episode this season, which is Jon’s story, that’s the most epic episode we’ve done.” Welcome back to life, Jon Snow. Keep an eye on it this time.