Kit Harington’s audition for Game of Thrones will surely go down in history. The actor was fresh off a role in War Horse and had three different auditions for the role of Jon Snow. He auditioned in a tiny room with a camera, reading a scene that he shares with Tyrion the in the pilot.
"I was fresh off the boat from drama school, and they were auditioning every young Brit in the U.K. [for Game of Thrones]," Harington tells Absolute Radio in an April interview. "For whatever reason, the producers spotted me on the second one and said, 'This guy looks upset enough to play Jon Snow.' He's a very solemn character."
Well, that and that he was already a very talented actor. But he may have had some help in balancing his sensitivity with a bit of a bad boy image. Basically, Harington auditioned for his now-iconic role with a giant black eye he got in a fight at a McDonald’s. This is his explanation, from an interview with W magazine.
"I went into McDonald's with this girl I was sort of dating at the time, and it was late at night and there was no seats,” Harington tells W. “I asked this guy and this girl he was with if we could sit at the same table, and they said yeah. We sat down, and quite quickly, he started being really rude to the girl I was with, you know, calling her names.”
Here’s where the heroic part kicks in.
“And then he called her something like an ugly pig, or something worse,” Harington tells W. “And I got up and said, ‘No no no, you can't call her that, get up.’ So I called him up for a fight, which I had never done before.”
Kind of like when he faces down Ramsay. We get it.
“I realized that I had to at that point throw the first punch, otherwise I'd look like a complete wimp,” Harington tells W. “And I got battered."
Oh so exactly like when he calls out Ramsay, charges stupidly into battle, and then gets saved by the cavalry. Hm. Maybe the "Battle of the Bastards" was more autobiographical than Harington would like to admit. But in this scenario, the Snow role is Petyr Baelish’s cavalry. The analogy breaks down from there.
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