KIT

e meet in East London on a rooftop almost as windswept as a Westeros moor. Kit Harington is wearing a jacket in an indigo linen weave and a shirt in a sturdy oxford cloth. He looks a bit like a farm boy dressed up for a day in town. The cascade of curls that was the signature of his character, Jon Snow, is tamed. For Harington, the show is over. And for us, the most epic series in the history of television has ended now, too. I cast my mind back to July 2011 and a Dolce & Gabbana event in London’s Westfield mall. It was a month after had debuted on HBO. The paparazzi were swarming around the designers, Naomi Campbell, local star. No-one noticed the slight, pretty, curly-haired young man standing all on his own. I went up to him to say how much I loved his show. He told me he was disappointed that no-one had recognised him. “Those innocent times,” Harington, 32, recalls with a laugh. “Those times when I wanted to be recognised. I was completely naive. I don’t think I was prepared for anything like this.” He doesn’t remember the night. He was a kid. But that was how he’d gotten the part in the first place. Jon Snow was written young, in keeping with author George R. R. Martin’s characters, most of whom were in their early teens at the beginning of the saga. “I didn’t have a beard back then, and I’ve got a bit of a baby face underneath this scruff, so I think that helped,” Harington recalls. “Then they went for a completely different take. ‘Grow a beard. Look rougher. That’s what we want.’ I pushed out this scruffy thing that they had to draw on and fill in, but, weirdly, I remember it as a rite of passage. I’d never tried [it] before and I grew this thing and it changed me. I felt like a man…a young man.”