Kit Harington's Life After Thrones

Kit Harington’s first on-screen role found him playing the lead in one of the most successful shows in TV history. Nearly a decade later, the British actor is preparing for another resurrection, and life away from Westeros

After nine years, 30-odd duels, 67 episodes, a choreographed battle sequence to rival any in Hollywood history, two sex scenes, one on-screen death, one on-screen resurrection, and all in all more than 100 extras slaughtered by sword or otherwise, Kit Harington is almost there. Almost finished. When it came to his final day on a properly peopled Game of Thrones set, last July (the long-running HBO drama was about to wrap for everyone except Harington, its star) he huddled up for a final puff among the colleagues he’d smoke with for nearly a decade. Then, ceremonially, acknowledging the end of an era, he quit the cigs. When we met with the British actor, he had one scene of GoT left to film. ‘A bit of green-screening,’ Harington says. Then he’s free.

As much as it’s possible to be institutionalized by a hit TV show, Harington has been. He is married to co-star, Rose Leslie, and the couple’s wedding last year was essentially a work bash, busy with colleagues. Now, 32, Harington has the frozen-in-time grooming of the 24-year-old he was when he was the first cast in Thrones – his coiled hair and scraggy beard so integral to his role as Jon Snow that the actor had little choice. Season after season on Thrones, doing his part to keep a hit a hit, Harington completed so many laps of the London-New York-Los Angeles promo circuit he stopped registering locales, only time zones. When we meet in an old-fashioned London hotel, he notes the shields and stag heads on the walls and calls it fitting place in which to have one of his last ever interviews about GoT. But you get the sense he’d sooner not look at another medieval trinket for a while.