Actor Kit Harington, who portrays Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, recently spoke to Time about his three-part miniseries coming to HBO on December 18 — Gunpowder. Harington will be producing and starring in the series, as his ancestor Robert Catesby, a character he had problems sympathizing with, the more he dug into his history.
"Reading up on him and looking at the real historical person, he thought quite a lot of himself. He really felt he was on the way to change history. He basically after a while couldn’t see what he was attempting which was to kill innocent people and become as bad as those people who were persecuting him."
Still, Harington doesn’t believe Catesby and his accomplices were terrorists, as he believes they were revolutionaries. instead, because when “you see terrorists in movies and it isn’t explored why they did what they did. There was a chance in this to do that.”
Harington says what drew him to make Gunpowder, was what people didn’t know about that fateful day on November 5.
"You know about the plot, you know about the 36 barrels [of gunpowder], you know about Guy Fawkes. You don’t know anything else! This is a fascinating period of history, a brutal one, and there was so much to explore that hadn’t been explored."
The actor also had a chance to praise Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss for the atmosphere they bring to their sets. Harington says he was trying to emulate that on his set, where “Everyone kind of feels like a family… I like to think I’m part of helping to achieve that in some way as well.”
As far as what fans can expect in Game of Thrones season 8, Harington didn’t reveal any details, but he did speak to the scale of it all.
"It’s a lot of—it’s just bigger than it’s ever been! It is sinking in, it’s just quite emotional. I don’t know how I’m going to feel sometime next year when I’ve finished. It’s quite a sudden shift, I guess, but it feels like the right time."
I guess we won’t know until sometime in 2019.
Next: Game of Thrones season 7 makes year-end best-of lists
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