Kit Harington explains what happened with his shelved Jon Snow sequel series

Game of Thrones Kit Harington is back in the spotlight. He recently appeared in a horror movie called The Beast Within and will star as morally flexible billionaire Henry Muck in the third season of HBO's Industry, which premieres this weekend. All of these character take him pretty far away from the morally upright Jon Snow, and according to Harington, that's part of the point. "Jon Snow was wonderful, I loved him, but he was sometimes tricky to play because he was morally kind of perfect, which is difficult to play sometimes," the actor told The Hollywood Reporter.

Harington expounded on that idea during an interview with Collider. "When you spend that many years in a heroic role, the natural pushback, creatively, is gonna be not wanting to do those kinds of parts. That’s always tricky as an actor because the industry only thinks of you as that thing, so you have some work to do to shift the dial a bit the other way and show your range. What I’ve been trying to do, in some ways, is just look for the deeply flawed characters. Jon Snow had his flaws, but they were all flaws rooted in goodness and truth. I don’t really fancy playing that kind of goodie right now."

That said, for a while, Harington was trying to get a Game of Thrones sequel series all about Jon Snow off the ground, but it didn't work out. If it were up to him, people never would have heard about the sequel show in the first place, and he was "annoyed" that word got out. "I wanted it to stay silent, so that if it didn’t work, we could just pretend nothing had happened." Now he's in the position of having to explain what went wrong. It ends up they just never found the right shape for the series: "With ours, it was just about not finding the right story and not finding something that was worth doing, to bring me back to it and to stay in it. It just made less sense, the longer we went on with it, so we recanted."

That all sounds fair enough; I'd much rather a sequel show not go into production than go forward and not be worth having made in the end. That said, Harington wouldn't turn down a Jon Snow sequel if the right idea came along. "There might be a time in the future, when some years pass, where there is a story that comes up and it feels right. I don’t know. But nothing is being thought through at the moment."

Sophie Turner got Kit Harington on board for her new movie The Dreadful

In the meanwhile, Harington is enjoying making other kinds of projects. In addition to the stuff we already mentioned, he'll reunite with Game of Thrones costar Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) in a movie called The Dreadful, which Harington describes as "a brilliant dark, gothic, strange film by a director called Natasha Kermani."

Actually, it was Turner who got him involved in this one. "Sophie sent to me. She was like, 'Would you like to do this? I really think you’d be right for it.' And I read it very quickly, which is always a good sign. I always find, if you’re trying to get to the end quickly because you wanna send the email saying, 'Yes,' that’s a good sign."

There's no release date for The Dreadful yet, but Industry season 3 premieres on HBO and Max this Sunday, August 11. Apparently it's one of Harington's many new roles where he gets naked, just FYI. "Yeah, it’s a bit weird. I seem to be getting nude in everything at the moment," he mused. "I’m nude in the [Slave Play on stage], I’m nude in Industry, I’m nude in [The Beast Within]. It’s just a lot. But they all had their reasons. Filming can get very strange when you’ve got a big, fake metal collar around your neck, naked in some abandoned church with a whole group of people looking at you while they’re eating their lunch. It’s just odd."

All right then.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and Twitter account, sign up for our exclusive newsletter and check out our YouTube channel.