Almost nothing is known about The Eternals, Marvel’s first real jump into post-Endgame storytelling. We know that it’ll star Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden and Brian Tyree Henry. We know that Kumail Nanjiani is so committed to his newfound superhero status that he recently transformed himself into a vacuum-packed bag of conkers for it. And we know that there’s a very good chance that Kit Harington will die in it.
To be clear, there is no insider information to suggest this. Nobody has leaked a script or posted a blurry set photo of Harington getting his face stabbed off with a lance or anything. But according to a new study, we do have maths on our side. Thanks to the tireless work of the unimpeachable data scientists who work at something called Buzz Bingo, we now know that Kit Harington is “the most likely male actor of all time to appear in a scene in which his character is killed”.
Don’t believe me? Fine. Look at his film Testament of Youth, in which he was shot by a sniper. Or Brimstone, where he had a fight with Guy Pearce and ended up getting shot in the head with his own gun. Or Pompeii, where he was hit by a molten wave of lava. Or Seventh Son, where Julianne Moore’s witch drained him of his life force. I don’t know whether any of you have seen The Death and Life of John F Donovan, in which Harington plays John F Donovan, but it doesn’t exactly end well for him either.
Harington dies in plenty of other media, too. Shot and decapitated in Gunpowder, stabbed in Game of Thrones, hit in the head with a tennis racket in 7 Days in Hell. Even in the videogame Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, the player gets to choose whether Harington gets stabbed in the neck or simply left to bleed to death. There is no option to keep him alive.
In fact, there are very few films in which Kit Harington gets to live. He didn’t die in the How to Train Your Dragon films, he didn’t die in Spooks: The Greater Good and, while his character didn’t die in the animated adaptation of Julia Donaldson’s beloved children’s book Zog, the story was set a long time ago, so it only stands to reason that he’s definitely dead, possibly after a long and painful illness.
Harington’s penchant for death is such that he’s more than 20% likely to die onscreen than his Game of Thrones father Sean Bean, a man who dies so frequently that #Don’tKillSeanBean became a trending hashtag in 2014. And yet he is a fraud. Compared to Kit Harington, Sean Bean positively thrums with a gleeful zest for life. If you had the choice of crossing a busy motorway with either Sean Bean or Kit Harington, you’d pick Sean Bean every time. Maths doesn’t lie. Harington would be pancaked before he’d even left the hard shoulder.
Now, I know what you’re thinking at this point. You’re thinking that Kit Harington cannot possibly die in The Eternals, because it is a film about a bunch of eternal people, and eternal people by definition are incapable of experiencing death.
But to that I say: ha! You’ve made the mistake of underestimating what a death-happy klutz Kit Harington is. You’ll be laughing on the other side of your face when, three minutes into the film, his horse will skid on some wet leaves and throw him down a concrete staircase into a burning pile of discarded medical syringes. Because that will happen. Even Kit Harington the Eternal will die. The maths don’t lie. Are you calling Buzz Bingo a liar?
