Kit Harington, the pretty little Caravaggio model who was cast to be placid and pouty as Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, has a profile in the June issue of Rolling Stone. In it we learn all kinds of facts: Harington pretends not to know who Ryan Gosling is, he hates Downton Abbey and his relative invented the flushable toilet!
The piece (which was actually published last month) highlights Harington’s path to joining the show. His mother, a playwright, got him into theater, he went to drama school, GoT producers saw him in a production of War Horse and then he got the part. Oh, and he’s a member of the aristocracy, but is fairly disdainful of the whole thing:
The interest in Harington’s past extends through the generations. He comes from a posh British family. Legend has it that the Haringtons are direct descendants of King Charles II, and his uncle is a baronet…His family is also said to have invented the first flushing toilet for Queen Elizabeth I. While Harington was happy to mug about the royal loo on Kimmel, he dismisses the rest of it as crap.
“There’s an unhealthy obsession in America with royalty and the class system,” says Harington, rolling his eyes. “‘Oh, my God, you’re the son of a duke!’ I’m not an anti-royalist, but who gives a shit?”
(In the game of toilet thrones, you win or you die.)
It’s easy to say “who gives a shit” about the class system when you’ve grown up benefitting from the class system, but okay! He also hates Downton Abbey for glamorizing the whole thing, so it’s not just Americans who are the subject of his ire.
His disdain for the old ways carries over to one of GoT‘s competitors in the prestige-soap-opera sweepstakes. “I really disagree with Downton Abbey on lots of fucking levels,” says Harington, before admitting he hasn’t seen many episodes. “It celebrates the class system, and its kind of overall message seems to be, ‘Wasn’t it good when everybody knew their place within society?’ Why should we hark back to those times? It was bullshit. We got out of that, and thank the fuck we did.”
Then there’s this little tidbit from behind the scenes of Game of Thrones:
Harington has grown especially close with John Bradley, who plays his buddy Samwell, a timid fat man who proves braver than many of the men of the Night’s Watch. It was Bradley whom Harington called after he broke his ankle trying to climb into his own apartment after a night of drinking (“Not one of my finer moments – I thought I let people down,” says Harington) before Season Three and thought he’d ruined his career and the show.
And finally, a Ryan Gosling anecdote:
“I was running along, listening to the Drive soundtrack, and the guy from the movie ran the other way,” says Harington. “It was quite funny. What’s his name?”
YOU LITERALLY KNOW NOTHING, JON SNOW.
Image via Getty.