Kit Harington already died once

Esquire.com: Kit Harington has bobbleheads on the brain. “I have to approve a new one every day,” he says. “I’m not joking. I’m asked, ‘Are you happy with how this looks?’ I’m like, ‘It’s a bobblehead—what do you want me to say?’ “

To be fair to the product designers, capturing in plastic the hirsute attributes that have become the obsession of Harington’s many millions of fans probably requires a level of attention reserved for conservators at the Louvre. And soon they’ll no longer have a live model: Harington is counting down the days until he can get a proper shave and a haircut. 

The time, as it happens, has nearly come: He has one last shoot day for the seventh and penultimate season of Game of Thrones, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For now, the scruffy face of one of pop culture’s defining franchises is sitting across from me in a back booth at a restaurant in New York’s East Village.

The hair will soon disappear, along with, in 2018, the show that made Harington famous. But what will live on is the outsized, tormented spirit of Jon Snow, the frostbitten hero he’s played for the better part of a decade.

Harington understands that his likeness will be mass-produced and hawked while the suits still have the chance to make a buck. But time is running out. “Without saying whether I make it to the last season,” he says, despite widespread reports that HBO extended his contract at $1.1 million per episode through the final 13 episodes—seven this season, six in the next—”we’ve been trying to say goodbye to the show this year.” That means saying goodbye to Jon Snow, too.

“Thrones nicely bookended my twenties, but I’m 30 now,” he says in between bites of a very 30-something meal: prosciutto, a leafy salad, jasmine tea. “Maybe I can reinvent myself and get away from an image that’s so synonymous with Thrones,” he says, his voice trailing off for a beat. “But maybe this was the role I was always meant to play and that was it.”

When Harington was brought in to audition for the role in 2009, he’d never been on camera. He’d landed only one professional gig of any kind, when he was twenty-one, as an equine-obsessed World War I soldier in the London production of War Horse, in 2008.

Success came easily to Harington; struggle was not in his vocabulary. When he got the part, he was enrolled at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, whose alumni include Judi Dench and Gael García Bernal. He grew up comfortably in West London and then Worcestershire, listening to people address his uncle and, more recently, his father—a businessman and now baronet—as “Sir.” 

Following an audition that he performed with a black eye—the result of a late-night brawl at a McDonald’s after a fellow patron insulted the woman he was with—and two callbacks, Harington was offered the role of Snow. He accepted immediately. “I’ve been very lucky,” he says.

For Benioff and Weiss, experience didn’t matter as much as presence. “He just had the look,” they say via email. “The brooding intensity; the physical grace; the chip-on-the-shoulder quality that we always associate with extraordinarily short people.” (Harington is five-foot-six.)

At the dawn of Peak TV, niche entertainment geared toward a small but dedicated fan base was supposed to be the future, and pop phenomena on the scale of Lost were supposed to be endangered species. Thrones proved that theory wrong. One measure of its enormous success is the dizzying number of think pieces it has inspired: “How Game of Thrones Explains Brazilian Politics.” “How Game of Thrones Explains Our World.” “Is Game of Thrones a Metaphor for the Spread of Infectious Diseases?” “Game of Thrones: A Metaphor for America.”

Martin is gratified to see his books and the show used to discuss everything from global warming to Donald Trump. “I think Joffrey is now the king in America,” Martin told me, referring to Thrones’ sadistic, power-mad brat. “And he’s grown up just as petulant and irrational as he was when he was 13 in the books.” 

For his part, Harington would prefer not to weigh in on American politics. “I believe in experts,” he says. He found it “annoying when Sean Penn decided to get involved in the Falklands. I was like, ‘It has nothing to do with you, Sean Penn.’ “ Still, he cannot help himself: “Mr. Donald Trump—I wouldn’t call him President, I’ll call him Mister,” he says. “I think this man at the head of your country is a con artist.”

As Thrones enters its seventh season, its political resonance may only grow stronger: The head of a wealthy, ostentatious family sits on the throne. Refugees have immigrated through the kingdom’s border wall. From abroad, dragon-sized chickens are coming home to roost. Former slaves are revolting against the elite. Harington’s pure-of-heart, born-again hero is rising. “Thrones can be used as a metaphor way too much, but if there’s one truth, I think, it’s that people who really desire power are the people who shouldn’t have it,” he says. “Maybe Jon’s the one person who should have it, because he’s not looking for it.”

As Jon Snow’s power on the show has grown, so too has the shadow the character casts over Harington’s future. “If I try and compete with Thrones,” he says, shaking his head, “if I’m like, ‘I need a Marvel movie, or the next big show on Amazon, or another one on HBO,’ then I’m just setting myself up for one hell of a fall.”

For his next film, Harington is putting his celebrity in the service of cinema’s brash 28-year-old Canadian enfant terrible, Xavier Dolan, as the titular character in The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, opposite Jessica Chastain and Natalie Portman. Harington describes the role as “a famous television actor who plays a heartthrobby-type person.” Donovan, who is gay, is outed just as a journalist, played by Chastain, sensationalises his innocent correspondence with an 11-year-old fan; as a result, the press wrongly paints him as a paedophile. Swordplay this is not.

By taking a career risk such as this—an indie movie about a controversial subject—Harington is capitalising on his good fortune. He’s a spokesman for Infiniti; soon he’ll be the face of Dolce & Gabbana’s fragrance the One for Men. “At the moment, I don’t have too much pressure on my shoulders,” he says.

Whatever comes next, one thing’s for sure: He’s not chasing awards. “I don’t really aim to get into that next big Oscar film,” he says. “That’s not really my route.” He and West, who used to write “Dumb and Dumber, Laurel and Hardy”–style skits at drama school, “might do a comedy next,” Harington says.

Or he might not do much of anything. “I’ll enjoy the madness quieting a bit,” he says. “I’d like a few years of relative obscurity.” It’s hard to know if he’s tempering his expectations, hedging his bets, or speaking from the heart—or perhaps all three.

(The full interview can be seen at http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a55226/kit-harington-after-game-of-thrones/)