Kit Harington is done with being Jon Snow. The actor who has played “the bastard who could be king” for close to a decade has said that he has no desire to play a similar character. Even though the role made him famous, Harington told Harper’s Bazaar that he’s interested in being part of a project that’s much different from Game of Thrones in the future.
“Maybe something slightly lighter,” the 32-year-old said of the characters he envisions playing. “It’s a very heavy, heavy show, heavy role. So something which is a bit lighter, a bit funnier maybe. Other than that, I don’t really know.”
Based on recent reviews of the show, Harington may have more reason to distance himself from the memory of Jon Snow. Last week’s episode, “The Bells,” has the lowest score on Rotten Tomatoes of any in the show’s history. Critics have slammed show creators David Benioff and D.B Weiss for having a major character, Daenerys Targaryen, turn into a genocidal maniac on a dragon in the span of two episodes.
“In the previous seven seasons, they had sporadically shown how ruthless Daenerys could be in her thirst for both power and vengeance,” wrote Michael Deacon for The Telegraph . “But never did they do enough to make it believable that, in The Bells, she would torch innocent, unarmed families by the thousand, long after their city had surrendered.”
The episode isn’t doing that well on IMDB either. It’s currently rated a 6.8 out of 10 stars.
As for Kit Harington, he has already given his opinion on the end of the show. When asked to describe the series finale in an interview with Pop Buzz , his answer was “disappointing.”
He has also said that filming the final season seemed engineered to “break” the actors involved.
“Everyone was broken at the end. I don’t know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending or if we were crying because it was so f**king tiring,” he said in an interview with GQ Australia.
He went on to add that the cast acknowledged that the show has been been the “best thing” to have happened to them, but that filming the final season was so brutal that they were happy to walk away from it.
No matter how the show ends, we’ll likely never see Kit Harington wielding a sword in a TV series or film ever again.
The final episode of Game of Thrones airs on May 19 on HBO.
