Kit Harington: ‘The acting never feels like work’

Playing Jon Snow in Game of Thrones has made Kit Harington a star. But he isn’t all swords and brooding looks. He talks to Ed Cumming about Spooks, politics and his role as a dim-witted tennis player

Two weeks before I meet Kit Harington I am waiting to be let into the premiere of the fifth season of Game of Thrones and get talking to a middle-aged man. The programme is HBO and Sky Atlantic’s golden trumpet, so they have rented the Tower of London for the night and erected a 1,000-seat cinema in its moat. Dragons are projected on to the outer walls; flaming torches line the approach. The queue is long and intractable. The man next to me, it turns out, is David Harington, or “Jon Snow’s father”, as he introduces himself, but even this is not enough to help him skip to the front. We stand in the drizzle and chat about his son.

“The thing Kit always says is that he’d do the acting for free,” says Harington Sr. “It’s all this other stuff that he gets paid for – the fame, the attention, the loss of privacy.” As if on cue, from somewhere beyond the wall comes a barrage of teenage shrieks. Kit has arrived on the red carpet. His voice booms incomprehensibly from a speaker. More screams, distant camera flashes. David sighs, but pride beams out of him. “He’s so busy that sometimes the easiest way to find out what’s happening to him is to search online. Google Analytics thinks I’m a 17-year-old girl from South America.”

What’s happening to Kit Harington is that he is becoming a film star. Thanks to his brooding turn as Jon Snow, the 28-year-old is one of the most recognisable men on television. Earlier this year he gave a well-received performance in Testament of Youth, James Kent’s adaptation of Vera Brittain’s First World War memoir. Now he’s taken on a modern spy thriller, starring as Will Holloway in Spooks: The Greater Good, a big-screen, big-budget version of the BBC MI5 series. But Harington seems uncomfortable being cast as the matinée idol.

When Kit and I sit down for lunch in a London restaurant he confirms his father’s words. “Whatever the project, whether I believe in it creatively or not, whether I am getting up at 5am for a 17-hour shoot, the acting never feels like work,” he says. “It’s all this…” he gestures at my risotto… “This is the work. The selling of it. People taking pictures of you in the street as if you were a rare bird of prey.” Earlier we were together in the open air for perhaps a minute and Harington was stopped twice for photos. “I understand when you’re in a big show and you look like you do, people want to show their mate on Instagram or whatever. But sometimes it feels like I’m a beautiful sunrise…” he says, before adding quickly “or a dying dog.”

Game of Thrones was never meant to be a hit. The pilot was a disaster and the series nearly didn’t get made. Harington was already enjoying a starburst career in the theatre. After graduating from Central School of Speech and Drama in 2008 he won a part in War Horse at the National and when the Game of Thrones pilot was shot, he was preparing for Posh – Laura Wade’s vicious satire on the Bullingdon Club – at the Royal Court. Remembering this earlier time, Harington’s face lights up.“My big tick list was the National, the Royal Court and the Donmar, and I’d just done the National. Lyndsey Turner, who directed Posh, is scarily intelligent. I remember we had six weeks’ rehearsal time, and for four and a half of them she just sat us round a table, really nailing each character. It was really Stanislavskian method, really intense.”

The blueish tinge to Harington’s blood is often placed high up in his biography: he’s a direct descendant of Charles II, his great-grandfather was a baronet, and he’s named after Christopher Marlowe. I wonder if the toxic Hooray Henrys portrayed resonated with his own childhood. “I think I was one of only two in the cast who didn’t go to private school. My dad went to Westminster, so I was vaguely aware of that kind of thing, but I hadn’t experienced it myself. We weren’t a particularly low-income family, but at the same time I’m not sure my parents would have been able to support me trying to make it as an actor.”

David had a company that ran trade shows. Kit’s mother, Deborah, taught creative writing at Birmingham University and wrote plays on the side. “I remember going to see some of her plays when we were young. It caused her a lot of stress. On the night of the premiere she would grip my hand so hard it hurt. Afterwards she would rush out of the theatre with her hands over her ears before she could hear anyone say anything about it. It’s the same for me. We spoke about it recently and bonded over it. It was terrifying for her, and I have the same thing now when I go to a premiere of one of my performances.”

He’d like to go to the theatre more often, but he’s out of touch, he says, and “everything gets sold out so far in advance, I can’t book tickets because I never know where I’ll be.”

We meet with the general election looming. Harington says he was “fiercely socialist” as a teenager, but which way will he cast his vote? “My father was traditionally very Conservative and my mother very Labour, so previously I went Lib Dem, but I don’t know how I’ll vote this time. I feel somewhere between Labour, Green and Lib Dems. But I was sympathetic to the way Lib Dems behaved in government; they had to show the country that a coalition could work and stand up to the Tories. Although they did fuck people on tuition fees.”

He gives a wry grin, one of not many that he allows. His parts have tended to be intense young men with a violent streak – Will Holloway in Spooks is not a departure. Can he do funny? “In my private life I like to think so. I’m not humourless,” he says, slightly defensively. “But perhaps it’s not a side that people see very often.” To rectify the situation he has made a comedy with Andy Samberg, which had its premiere at South by Southwest. “I play a very stupid English tennis player with an overcontrolling mother,” he says. “I haven’t been in much comedy for a while. You find out very quickly if you can do it or not.”

His special quality, as far as I can tell, is stillness. The man does not fidget. While he “snaffles a quick fag” before we eat, his smoking arm folds at the elbow and straightens unwaveringly back to his side. He twirls the props he is given during the photo shoot with a practised economy of movement, perhaps from five years of handling a sword. He has a melancholic resting face on to which it is hard not to project deep and sensitive feelings. An early director called him the next Brando. Female fans of Game of Thrones have called him all sorts of things, mainly complimentary. It has stood him in good stead as Jon Snow, a character who has grown from a moody adolescent into a troubled but increasingly confident leader. “I feel like I knew what I was doing with Jon Snow from the start. I love those characters in The Wire or The Sopranos who reveal themselves over several seasons. I have tried to take it slowly; some might say too slowly.” Another grin.

For the foreseeable future the role dictates which other jobs he can take, where in the world he’ll be, and his haircut – “about shoulder length”. One of the reasons he took the Spooks movie is because it fitted with the filming schedule, although he also relished the opportunity to “run around with a gun”. Four years since Game of Thrones first aired, Harington is still coming to terms with its implications. He has an older brother, Jack, who lives in Dubai and serves as a point of comparison. “He used to beat me at go-karting, video games, ping pong, everything,” Kit says. I suggest that it must have been annoying for Jack when the little brother came up on the inside and became an international celebrity.

“See, if I may be so bold, a comment like that is what’s wrong with the world. People think that this, being a famous actor or whatever, is the only achieveable goal in life. Jack doesn’t give a shit about any of the Thrones stuff. There’s no amount of money you could pay him to do this.” I haven’t the heart to tell him that it was his father who, in all good humour, suggested the “snuck up on the inside” line.

“But it does no good to wonder about what might have been,” Kit adds. “This is the path that was given me. Plus, I have a flat – the Flat That Thrones Bought. I’m incredibly lucky.” He’s in the process of upgrading this to the House That Thrones Bought. Still, he must worry about the Jean-Luc Picard effect, where the first three rows of every Patrick Stewart play are filled with people doing Vulcan salutes. “As long as they’re coming to see the play, I’m happy. And it’s only the first three rows. Anyway, I accepted that I’ll most likely be remembered for Jon Snow a long time ago.”

Watch a video review of the film

Spooks: The Greater Good is out on 8 May

Watch the British Academy Television Awards, Sunday 10 May, 8pm, BBC One and BBC One HD

Contributor

Ed Cumming

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Spooks in hot pursuit of Avengers at the UK box office
Loyal fans of the TV spy series turn out to greet its arrival on the big screen, but Age of Ultron’s superheroes reign supreme for a third week

Charles Gant

12, May, 2015 @2:45 PM

Article image
Spooks movie casts Game of Thrones actor in lead role

Kit Harington to play agent on track of escaped terrorist in big screen adaptation of cult TV spy show

Andrew Pulver

08, Nov, 2013 @10:43 AM

Article image
Mark Gatiss: ‘Doctor Who is my first love, my last, my everything’
He played Peter Mandelson, was in Wolf Hall, co-created Sherlock, starred in and wrote for Doctor Who and will be in The Vote on election night. The everyman actor says he’s a ‘politics junkie’ who is desperate to save the BBC

Carole Cadwalladr

01, May, 2015 @2:00 PM

Article image
Emilia Clarke: out of the dragon's den

Emilia Clarke is the star of Game of Thrones who wants to appear in Ibsen. Now she's appearing alongside Jude Law in one of the best films of the year. She talks to Emma John about Dom Hemingway, Dothraki rituals, and the pitfalls of Hollywood dating

Emma John

27, Oct, 2013 @9:00 AM

Article image
Meet the stars of the Observer Magazine's Bafta TV special
To celebrate the House of Fraser Bafta TV awards, here’s a special portfolio of the biggest stars of the small screen, starring everyone from Kit Harington and James Nesbitt to Frances de la Tour and Archie Panjabi

Alice Fisher and Megan Conner

03, May, 2015 @10:00 AM

Article image
Kit Harington: film industry guilty of 'sexism towards men'
Game of Thrones star says he finds it demeaning and sexist when he is asked to strip during photoshoots and wants to be seen as ‘more than a head of hair’

Ben Child

31, May, 2016 @10:29 AM

Article image
Game of Thrones stars Kit Harington and Rose Leslie to marry
Actors, who play on-screen lovers Jon Snow and Ygritte in HBO’s hit fantasy series, announce engagement in the Times

Jamie Grierson

27, Sep, 2017 @8:23 AM

Article image
‘It was a win-win situation’: Rose Leslie on movies, motherhood and marriage
Game of Thrones’ Rose Leslie on playing the Time Traveler’s Wife and life with Kit Harington

Emma Beddington

22, May, 2022 @7:00 AM

Article image
Jessica Hynes: ‘It’s heartening watching happy people hang out on sofas’
As we gear up for the Bafta Awards, Jessica Hynes talks about her TV favourites, revealing why Top Gear made her hungry and her love for Cucumber

Jessica Hynes

03, May, 2015 @7:15 AM

Article image
Deadly charms: can Kit Harington survive Marvel's The Eternals?
Data analysis suggests the Game of Thrones star is the most likely male actor of all time to have his character killed off. So are his days numbered in his new superhero film?

Stuart Heritage

07, Jan, 2020 @12:53 PM