‘Big season’ coming for Thrones’ Jon Snow
What will become of central character?
Game of Thrones season debut, Sunday, HBO Canada
MAGHERAMORNE, NORTHERN IRELAND — Kit Harington is anxious. Oddly, considering Game of Thrones’ penchant for relieving central characters of their heads, the 27-year-old British actor’s concern is not for the safety of his character — the kindhearted bastard Jon Snow. Nor or is it for his brothers in the order of The Night’s Watch, the Seven Kingdom’s miscreant defence against wildling humans and supernatural ice zombies.
Rather, Harington’s anxiety stems from a worrisome mental lapse that has put both his safety and the day’s tight production schedule in jeopardy: He’s left his glasses in his hotel room.
“I’m doing a sword fight,” Harington says between worried cigarette puffs (an act jarring enough to break any Game of Thrones fan’s suspended disbelief), “and I’m completely blind.”
It’s an unseasonably sunny mid-October day in Northern Ireland, and Harington, in full Night’s Watch regalia, is in the middle of shooting the fourth of 10 episodes that comprise Game of Thrones’ fourth season. In the show, as in A Song of Ice and Fire, the George R.R. Martin book series it’s based on, the military outpost of Castle Black lies along The Wall — a gargantuan ice barrier built at the northern peak of civilized society. On Earth, however, the Watch’s HQ is situated in a disused quarry about an hour outside Belfast, where the majority of the Game of Thrones is filmed and where, presently, Harington’s corrective lenses are situated.
Harington spent little time on the Castle Black set over the past year as his character perused his own Bond-like covert mission beyond The Wall — losing his virginity, his heart and ultimately nearly his life to a fiery wildling named Ygritte. Between seasons, Harington was in Toronto shooting Pompeii, his first leading film role. As fate would have it, the stay which coincided with Game of Thrones‘ most disturbing, blood-churning moment yet: The Red Wedding.
“I was alone in Toronto, on my own,” he says of watching the butchering of his TV brother and stepmother. “It was a weird feeling. I was upset because (actors) Michelle (Fairley) and Richard (Madden) were going. But at the end I literally jumped up and wept for joy because I personally thought they nailed it. “It was a mixed bag.” With Snow’s fourth-season return to Castle Black, Harington admits to feeling “a weird sort of déjà vu.”
“I’m wearing the training gear and it’s very similar to doing the training-yard fight we did in Season 1,” he says. Similar, but not the same. “I hated the wigs. Now it’s pure Harington hair — I never knew it would be curly,” he smiles. “And this is my first beard, too. I didn’t know I could grow one.”
This isn’t the first time Harrington and the rest of his castmates have felt déjà vu. After a disastrous initial run, HBO asked showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss to reshoot the pilot, demanding a “dirtier” esthetic. By the start of the fourth season, Game of Thrones’ mammoth production stretches across the world, filming in Croatia, Iceland, Morocco and multiple Northern Ireland locations, and is HBO’s most successful (and costly) show, with 5.4 million viewers watching the Season 3 finale on the paid cable network in the U.S. and a record 5.9 million illegally downloading the episode, according to digital piracy news site TorrentFreak.
During a break from filming, Game of Thrones’ coproducer and writer Bryan Cogman considers the show’s achievements: “I didn’t personally know if a show that was this complicated, strange and genre-bending would find a huge audience. It’s been very gratifying.”
Cogman, like the rest of the cast, credits much of Game of Thrones’ accomplishments to Martin, who not only serves as a producer but also writes one episode per season.
Cogman claims Season 4 is “without question our biggest in terms of spectacle. We’re not cutting back on anything: sex, violence or profanity.” Carefully, he adds, “This is a big season for Jon Snow.”
“I always knew he was a lead in the show,” Harington says about his character when informed of Cogman’s comments. But, as the oftcited quote goes, “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die,” and Martin — who is currently penning the sixth of the seven planned Song novels — has yet to seal Snow’s fate.
“I don’t want to know if Jon lives or dies. I want it to be a surprise,” Harington says. If he were to perish, though, the actor wishes Snow “a good death. Something epic. Taking out a dragon, maybe.”