Game of Thrones Star Kit Harington Shares Why Jon Snow Series Was Scrapped
None of the ideas the creatives were developing "excited" them.
When HBO's Game of Thrones concluded in 2019, it definitively closed the journeys of certain characters, but in the case of Kit Harington's Jon Snow, there were many more chapters to potentially explore. Despite a sequel series focusing on Jon Snow being announced in 2022, progress on such a spinoff has stagnated indefinitely, with Harington himself recently expressing that he and the other creatives failed to all find the best avenue to explore with the character. Luckily, the actor admitted how he'd rather avoid developing a series if the creatives couldn't align their visions. With the success of House of the Dragon, though, we shouldn't rule out a possible Jon Snow series forever.
"What I can tell you is it was HBO that came to me and said, 'Would you consider this?' My first reaction was no," Harington revealed to GQ. "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. We spent a couple of years back and forth developing it. And it just didn't... nothing got us excited enough. 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.'"
As far as any specifics about a possible storyline, Harington kept coy, confessing, "I don't really want to say ... because it starts a whole thing."
Part of what made Harington's potential return for a sequel series so surprising to audiences is that the actor expressed the various pressures of making the series took a major impact on his mental health, which included coping with ADHD and alcoholism. With a relatively small amount of time since he played Jon Snow, he also admitted a sequel would ultimately take a toll on his outlook as an actor.
"[But] it was also working against what I'm trying to do, which is separate myself from [the show]," Harington admitted. "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."
Stay tuned for updates on the future of the Game of Thrones franchise.
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