Kit Harington has finally returned to HBO, but not for the highly anticipated Game of Thrones spinoff series that was being developed for his character, Jon Snow.
Ahead of his new role on Season 3 of the HBO drama Industry, Harington reflected on why the GOT spinoff series failed to take off after years of development.
“I don’t really want to say, because it starts a whole thing,” he said in a new interview with GQ.
But the actor explained he was initially willing to return to the franchise, though he had some hesitations.
“What I can tell you is it was HBO that came to me and said, ‘Would you consider this?’ My first reaction was no,” he said. “And then I thought there could be an interesting and important story about the soldier after the war. I felt that there might be something left to say and a story left to tell in a pretty limited way.”
Harington said he spent “years” going “back and forth” and developing the show until he ultimately decided to abandon the series, a decision he announced in just May of this year.
“It just didn’t . . . nothing got us excited enough,” he confessed. “In the end, I kind of backed out and said, ‘I think if we push this any further and keep developing it, we could end up with something that’s not good. And that’s the last thing we all want.’”
The spinoff series was meant to follow Jon after the controversial series finale, which saw the soldier being exiled to live on the Wall after he killed Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke). He recently confirmed that the show is “off the table” because they “couldn’t find the right story to tell.” But he added there “may be a time in the future” where they can revisit the series.
While speaking to GQ, Harington spoke candidly about how he felt about the show and possibly returning to the franchise one day.
“There’s a lot of baggage that goes with it, and I think that was part of the problem,” he said. While confessing that Game of Thrones may be “the biggest, most important piece of work” of his career, the actor expressed that he needed to “divorce” himself from the franchise so he could find more work.
“It was also working against what I’m trying to do, which is separate myself from [the show],” he said. “By still being with it, it [would be] very hard to ask people to see you as something else. And it’s kind of essential to do my job, for people to come and see me and not see Jon Snow.”
He also acknowledged that the GOT finale was widely criticized for being “rushed.”
“I understand some people thought it was rushed and I might agree with them,” he shared. “But I’m not sure there was any alternative. I look at pictures of me in that final season and I look exhausted. I look spent. I didn’t have another season in me.”
“I think if there was any fault with the end of Thrones, it’s that we were all so f***ing tired, we couldn’t have gone on longer,” he admitted.
