Kit Harington opens up about the difficulties he had playing Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, and what role these sorts of leading characters should have on TV today.
Kit Harinton is getting honest about his time playing Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, telling The Telegraph that while he enjoyed filming the first three seasons (his peak was season 3, when he worked a lot with his future wife Rose Leslie), by the end of the show, things were wearing on him. “I cried a lot in the last season, just out of sheer fatigue,” he said.
It got so bad that after it was all over, he found himself reassessing things. “It has been interesting — going through lockdown, getting over this TV show, where, by the end of it, I didn’t know if I wanted to be an actor anymore.”
I’m guessing this roughly corresponds to the period after Game of Thrones season 8 came out when Harington took a chance to “spend some time at a wellness retreat to work on some personal issues,” to use the words of his publicist.
Happily, Harington did return to acting, as for example in the second season of Netflix’s Criminal, available now. But he has made a decision to avoid playing traditionally heroic roles like Jon Snow. “Having portrayed a man who was silent, who was heroic, I feel going forward that is a role I don’t want to play anymore. It is not a masculine role that the world needs to see much more of.”
It ends up Harington has some pretty interesting thoughts about masculinity of the kind of Jon Snow represents: internal, brooding, hard. It’s definitely an archetype you can see across the ages. Even just sticking to fantasy fiction, you can trace a line from Aragorn (Game of Thrones) to Rand al’Thor (The Wheel of Time) to Jon Snow.
“I feel that emotionally men have a problem, a blockage, and that blockage has come from the Second World War, passed down from grandfather to father to son,’ Harington said. “We do not speak about how we feel because it shows weakness, because it is not masculine.”
I think Harington did a good job of bringing some softer notes into his portrayal of Jon Snow, but he was working within an archetype. According to him, that clashed with how he was raised, citing a time he wanted his mom to buy him a Mighty Max toy, something associated with boys, but she encouraged him to play with Polly Pockets instead. He says his upbringing “was very gender fluid from the word go.”
I think Harington raises some interesting points, although considering he’s playing the character Dane Whitman, aka the Black Knight, in the upcoming Marvel tentpole movie The Eternals, I wonder if he’s gotten as far away from traditional hero roles as he’s hoping, although I suppose the movie could throw us a curveball where that’s concerned.
What do you all make of this? Are we ready to move away from heroes on the Aragorn-Jon Snow-Han Solo spectrum? Was Jon on that spectrum to begin with?
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