Poor Kit Harington. As if being a part of one of the biggest television shows in history didn’t already come with a lot of fan harassment, he also had to spend nine months lying to everyone about being dead and done with Game of Thrones. For that entire stretch of time, every interview and encounter probably involved the dreaded question “Is Jon Snow really dead?” and each time he’d have to look whoever asked in the eye and say “Yes, he is.”
Of course, that turned out to be untrue. In the second episode of season six, Jon Snow rose from the dead. And the first thing Harington did was apologize, telling Entertainment Weekly “I’d like to say sorry for lying to everyone.”
That’s okay, Kit. No one ever believed you in the first place … but you do get major points for playing along. Let’s take a look at the history of his denials.
At first Kit seemed pretty pleased with the fan response to his character’s death.
“I was hoping that there would be an outcry of ‘why?’ and ‘oh god, no, no’ rather than ‘thank god’. That was the right reaction as far as I was concerned!” he told Digital Spy. “People didn’t want me to die, but he’s dead. So there you go, everyone has to get used to it.”
Amidst ample social-media evidence that he was back in Ireland and rumors he was on the Game of Thrones set filming, a new strategy had to be figured out to explain things.
“I had to be a dead body in Northern Ireland,” Kit told The Sunday Times Culture Magazine. “You can’t just forget that he’s actually died. I had to be a dead body, so there was a certain amount of filming that had to be done. I’m bloody good at playing a dead body … it was some of my best work!”
He also pointed toward his busy schedule, hoping it might convince some that he really didn’t have time to film season six of Game of Thrones.
“I’m really dead. I’m not coming back,” Harington insisted in an interview with the Guardian. “I’ve got a film lined up straight after this [Faustus] with Xavier Dolan, The Death and Life of John F Donovan. I’m playing a young TV star about to break into movies, who is very troubled and finds himself wrapped up in scandal, and is unfairly set upon. It’s about his descent.”
And hey, whether people believed him or not, it was good free promotion for all his other projects.
Throughout the entire process, Harington managed to keep a good humor.
“I just hope everyone keeps watching the show,” he joked at one point. “God, now I’m gone, nobody’s going to watch it!”
