Kit Harington talks life after Game of Thrones, metaphor, and Jon Snow’s epic hair

There’s a new interview with Kit Harington (Jon Snow) up on Esquire, and it’s a lot of fun. Author Logan Hill talked to Harington towards the end of filming on season 7, and also got quotes from a lot of his fellow cast and crew members. It’s an interesting portrait not only of where Harington’s head is at nowadays, but what his life is like on set.

As it ends up, there’s a LOT of good-natured ribbing between cast members. Let’s run down what some of the other people on the show had to say about Harington:

• Emilia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen): “There’s a consistent drumbeat of taking the piss out of his incredible hair and startling good looks. His hair just takes over everything. My ridiculous handcrafted wig doesn’t come close to standing up to his man bun.”
• Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister): “There’s a change in the level of female lust in the room when Kit is there, which all the males find annoying and disrespectful.”
• Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth): “His hair has its own trailer.”

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss got in on the fun, too. They explained the inspiration between a certain exchange in season 6’s “Oathkeeper”: you know, the one where Tormund tells Jon he can’t be a god on account of his small pecker.

"There has to be some downside to being Kit Harington, right? It seems only fair. He’s handsome, talented, smart, and so decent to the core that it’s impossible not to like him. Maddening. The one thing we can do is saddle his character with a tiny pecker."

Harington’s response to all this: “They’re all reprobates.” Sounds like a fun set.

Beyond the roast portion of the interview, Harington contemplated what’s next for him after Game of Thrones wraps in 2018. “Thrones nicely bookended my twenties, but I’m thirty now,” he said. “Maybe I can reinvent myself and get away from an image that’s so synonymous with Thrones. But maybe this was the role I was always meant to play and that was it.”

It’s an interesting question: how do you follow up something as huge as Game of Thrones? For Harington, the answer is to go in a different direction. “If I try and compete with Thrones, if I’m like, ‘I need a Marvel movie, or the next big show on Amazon, or another one on HBO,’ then I’m just setting myself up for one hell of a fall.”

There was a time when Harington tried to trade on his Game of Thrones exposure with roles in other action films, including the historical drama Pompeii and the spy flick Spooks: The Greater Good. It sounds like he regrets that now. “A few years back, I should have said, ‘I want to do stories that may not be as blockbustery but are interesting.'”

That’s what he’s doing now. His upcoming non-GoT-related projects include The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, where he plays a gay movie heartthrob falsely accused of pedophilia by the press, and Gunpowder, a three-part BBC miniseries about the plot to blow up the English House of Lords in 1605.

None of those are likely to become a phenomenon on the scale of Game of Thrones, and that suits Harington just fine. “I’ll enjoy the madness quieting a bit,” he said. “I’d like a few years of relative obscurity.”

But before that, he still has another season of Game of Thrones to film, and one for the viewing public to watch. “Without saying whether I make it to the last season, we’ve been trying to say goodbye to the show this year,” he said. And that was as close as he came to spoiling anything, unless you count his thoughts on the overall theme of the show:

"Thrones can be used as a metaphor way too much, but if there’s one truth, I think, it’s that people who really desire power are the people who shouldn’t have it. Maybe Jon’s the one person who should have it, because he’s not looking for it."

Game of Thrones season 7 debuts on July 16.

Other interesting bits from the interview:

• Apparently, Harington showed up to his Jon Snow with a black eye he got during a fight at a McDonald’s the night before, after someone insulted the woman he was with.
• Benioff and Weiss on why they chose Harington for the part: “He just had the look. The brooding intensity; the physical grace; the chip-on-the-shoulder quality that we always associate with extraordinarily short people.”
• Benioff and Weiss praising Harington’s performance opposite Andy Samberg in HBO’s 2015 comedy 7 Days in Hell: “[Harington’s] got the timing of a natural straight man, in the manner of a Hugh Grant, without being a douchebag, in the manner of a Hugh Grant.”
• Hill also got quotes from George R.R. Martin himself. Without getting all political ourselves, we’ll just say that he had some interesting thoughts on President Donald Trump: “I think Joffrey is now the king in America. And he’s grown up just as petulant and irrational as he was when he was thirteen in the books.”