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This article contains spoilers for Industry season 3
Along the narrow pathway next to Regent’s Canal, joggers weave past tables of lunchtime drinkers and blackboards beckoning them inside for a cocktail. It is a high-wire act: one wrong swerve and they could find themselves submerged. Just around the corner, Kit Harington walks into a small café and immediately reads my mind: “Is it a bit too loud in here?” I look around at the gurgling coffee grinder, the baby fussing on a nearby lap, the bros in chore jackets who look like they have a lot to catch up on, and nod.
So we’re out the door and across the road in this corner of North London where Harington lives – well, for some of the year – with his wife, actor Rose Leslie, and their two small children, to try a new spot outside an artisan deli. No good. As soon as we start talking, a car rumbles past and Harington glances at my dictaphone with a furrowed brow – Jon Snow, sensing a wildling. “Right,” he says, “there’s a pub over the road. Let’s try that.”
We settle, eventually, in the small corner of a quiet beer garden and he goes to get us drinks – two sparkling waters – as the sky above continues to toss a coin between summer and spring. Our new location feels vaguely inappropriate, because one of the topics I want to ask about is his treatment for alcoholism in 2019 at the height of his Game of Thrones fame. That year, his life and the show hit the skids at the same time. Harington entered rehab in America – still drunk – just as the finale, six seasons in the making, was being eviscerated by fans and critics with such fervour that there was a petition (still online) to force its creators to remake it, signed by over 1.8m people. “I went in and everyone loved Thrones; I came out and everyone hated it,” Harington says. “I thought, What the fuck is going on?!”
It turns out there’s no need to worry. Harington likes being around alcohol – likes dancing with drunk people, likes, even, going to Glastonbury, which he describes as “sober ninja stuff”. Over the next two hours, the story of his recovery will take us to some dark but hopeful places. But there is one thing is obvious right away: Harington looks good. Not good as in handsome – though he is of course that too – but good as in well, at ease, present. He has the eyes of a young parent: exhausted but sparkling slightly, as if seeing in colour for the first time, and a few grey streaks in his black beard. But nothing about the 37-year-old’s bearing betrays anxiety or impatience.
It is, I will confess, a relief. I first met Harington a world ago in 2017, when Game of Thrones was at the crest of its cultural dominance and he was arguably the most recognisable face on TV. He was polite but distracted, a touch aloof. As he said later of that period: "I was trying to project this image of utter sophistication and coolness about what I was doing but genuinely [was] sort of terrified about everything.” It took a lot, for Harington to get from there to where he is now, but he’s happy to talk about it. “OK,” he says leaning forward, “is this definitely quiet enough, now?”
First, we need to talk him about him being pissed on. This year Harington stars in Industry, the cult HBO/BBC drama set in London about a group of graduates fighting for position in a prestigious investment bank. Launched mid-pandemic in 2020, Industry is part Wolf of Wall Street, part Euphoria. Sex, drugs and personal trauma are cut with panic attack–inducing scenes from the trading floor where its stars – including Robert (Harry Lawtey), Harper (Myha’la Herrold) and Yasmin (Back To Black’s Marisa Abela) – stare at stock prices on screens like gamblers around a bookie’s window and bark confusing things like “cover that risk, now!”
For this make-or-break third season, writers Mickey Down and Konrad Kay have given Industry a notable Succession-style glow-up. We spend time on a superyacht (where, as per TV tradition, terrible tragedies must take place) and with the clandestine political and media elite who, along with their banker friends, collude in running the country. From that group emerges Harington’s Sir Henry Muck, a man of obscene family wealth – and some unusual sexual tastes – masquerading as the CEO of a trendy green-tech energy company that ends up ripping off its customers.
It was Harington’s idea to join the show. He’d been a fan for a couple of years – “It stood out as totally unique,” he says – so he asked his agent to make some calls. Down and Kay jumped at the chance to add a household name to their lineup: no audition required. “That’s always slightly alarming,” Harington says, “because you walk onto set and you can feel them going, What if he's not right? And you feel the pressure of, What if what I do is not right for them?”
As it happens, Industry may be Harington’s best work since Thrones. He elevates what could have been a posh idiot cutout into someone weird and sensitive and oddly sympathetic. “I've met a million guys like Henry,” says Harington, “And I really prefix this with saying I think a lot of private and public school boys get a very bad rap. There's many, many very nice guys who are privately educated. But I've met some who are entitled in a specific way, which is not obvious. Not your creep, or loudmouth. It's more like, as much as they might purport to see the world and all its breadth, they really have a very tunnel-vision view of things.”
Still, the pissing. We find out early on Muck has a predilection for watersports, something Yasmin – who takes centre stage this season, fleeing demons from her own highly privileged past – indulges him in as they shower together. “When I was reading the script I was like, This is gonna end with a props guy with a bottle and me lying down, and it's gonna be awful. So actually I was pleasantly surprised,” says Harington. There is an unexpected tenderness to the scene, but also a dark undertow. “He’s using therapy language to get something that he wants, which feels manipulative and off. Ten years ago, Henry might have just out and out sexually harassed people. But now he has morphed the way he does things into emotionally manipulating them. He's moved with the modern world. He uses the word vulnerable a million times.”
Back in 2015, Harington had a bruising experience with the price of fame and the cost of speaking his mind. After sharing in an interview how uncomfortable it made him to be sexualised in his role as Jon Snow, there was a swift backlash. He was accused of moaning in the press and by other celebrities (“He’s a sex symbol. Get over it,” Patricia Clarkson told The Guardian). It makes his decision, I say, to join one of the horniest shows on TV a little surprising.
“One of the first things I said to Mickey and Kon was, ‘You guys are running a sexy show here. And I know you're going to want me to shave, because it’s banking isn’t it? And I just do not look sexy without a beard. I look like a tired child. No one's gonna believe that Marisa would go for me.’ They agreed, thankfully,” Harington tells me.
Beard intact, there are several scenes that show off how in shape he is, including some topless squash and a moment he steps out of a swimming pool naked. “That was my own work,” he confirms. “I go to the gym for my head anyway. But when I knew I was getting my bum out, I was like, OK, you're on the squats this week.”
In 2015, Harington backed down in the sexism row, telling Good Morning America, “I've decided I'm going to be a good little hunk and shut up.” He said it like a joke, but the frustration at not being allowed to speak his mind was plain to see. Today, he has no such qualms. “I am aware that anything I say now is in context of me getting my bare arse out on Industry,” he laughs, “[but] listen, I just think it's a stupid word. Anytime I see a young male actor bandied about as being a hunk or heartthrob, it minimises them to their appearance. We shouldn't do that to women, we shouldn't do it to men. That's just how I feel about it.”
One of the strangest TV news stories of recent years was that Kit Harington is planning a Game of Thrones spin-off show, called Snow. It was strange because, of all the cast members, Harington seemed the one most desperate to move on. Maybe it was the hunk stuff. Maybe it was the endless memes – like pouty Jon Snow – and people asking for autographs (which he had to start refusing), or shouting “You know nothing!” at him in the street. Maybe it was the fact he had to keep his hair – the subject of endless online how-to tutorials – the same for eight long years. Whatever it was, watching the media circus around Thrones in 2019, it was clear Harington was over it.
“I think if there was any fault with the end of Thrones, is that we were all so fucking tired, we couldn't have gone on longer. And so I understand some people thought it was rushed and I might agree with them. But I’m not sure there was any alternative. I look at pictures of me in that final season and I look exhausted. I look spent. I didn't have another season in me.” And the backlash to the final episode specifically? “Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I think there were mistakes made, story-wise, towards the end maybe. I think there were some interesting choices that didn’t quite work.”
Earlier this year, Harington confirmed Snow had been shelved. So what happened? And what was the storyline going to be anyway: Jon Snow, living out his retirement in Hardhome, perhaps lured back to King’s Landing on a doomed mission to become Brann’s Hand of the King, like his father?
“I don’t really want to say,” says Harington, reticent for the first time in our conversation, “because it starts a whole thing.” Even now, the Thrones fandom can be vociferous. “What I can tell you is it was HBO that came to me and said, ‘Would you consider this?’ My first reaction was no. 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.’”
I wonder whether there was a strange comfort in keeping a line to Jon Snow alive, even just as a theory, a concept – like texting an ex when the future starts to feel scary. It must have been a tough decision, emotionally, to know whether to go back or move on.
“Yeah. There's a lot of baggage that goes with it, and I think that was part of the problem,” says Harington. “In some ways, you need to divorce completely from this previous thing, and we're only a few years after it. The role will always be just such a significant factor of my life. It might very well be the biggest, most important piece of work I do. I met my wife on it. I have kids from it. Have some lifelong friends from it. I'm recognised in the street because of it.
“[But] it was also working against what I'm trying to do, which is separate myself from [the show]. 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.”
For now, Snow looks unlikely to be revived. The same can be said for Harington’s brief venture into the MCU in 2021 with Eternals, which saw a planned sequel reportedly canned following an underwhelming box-office performance. Harington played Dane Whitman in a short appearance that was setting him up to become Black Knight, a niche but beloved Marvel character connected to the seemingly doomed Blade film. “I'm not gonna pretend I took that [role] because it was different and interesting. If Marvel calls, you gotta do it,” he jokes, although he liked his character and would be interested to return if they changed their mind.
Other than that, Harington is just happy to keep working, keep taking jobs that let him stay near his kids, keep doing things like Industry that he finds interesting and fun. Without spoiling too much, series 3 ends in a way that feels pretty conclusive for Yasmin and Henry, but it’s nothing a creative week in the writer’s room couldn’t sort out if, as is hoped, this proves to be a breakout season for the show. “I think they've left it open-ended in a really clever way,” says Harington. “They don't know what the season is going to do, and I think it is a crunch season, to figure out whether it goes further. [But] I think the intention is very much for it to carry on, and I'd love to [go back].”
As we speak, he is also days away from scratching his stage itch by starting rehearsals for Slave Play, Jeremy O Harris’s controversial triptych about race and sex, which will start its West End run in July. “This is gonna sound really wanky, and I'm aware of it – it’s a very Henry thing to say – but for me, [the play] is a chance to educate myself, very palpably, about a subject I probably don't know enough about,” says Harington. This includes plans for “Blackout” nights to which only Black audience members are invited, which drew criticism from Rishi Sunak earlier this year. “I might have been one of those people who looked at a Blackout night and went, Eh, I don't know about that… But in the process of being involved, I've realised how important it is and had that explained to me in a way that I understand,” says Harington. “So the outrage just seems so silly. The theatre in London, and around the country, is predominantly, most times you go there, a ‘whiteout’ night. It just is. It's a white space. These are a couple of nights that we've earmarked where we go, Well, we'd like these to feel like a different type of night that is inclusive. And that's a really fucking great thing.”
A few weeks after our conversation, I go and see Harington in Slave Play. He plays Jim, the uptight and priggish partner of a woman undergoing a seismic reckoning with her racial identity. The role involves sex and full frontal nudity, playing lines for laughs one moment, growling racial epithets before a shocked audience the next. It is a remarkable piece of art, and Harington is remarkable in it, both restrained and completely fearless.
Our quiet corner of the beer garden has been compromised: two women have brought a bottle of rosé out to conspire over in the late afternoon sun. Harington suggests we head inside, where we reassemble around a table in an otherwise empty room. Talk turns to ageing; shifting priorities; the fact he doesn’t know if he’d welcome a Thrones-sized hit now because of the time it would mean away from home.
I share something I heard recently that has been playing around in my head as I, like him, come towards the end of my 30s: that everything that happens in life before 40 is just research.
Harington smiles and offers a reframing: “Everything before kids is research. It does just change everything. I think, at heart – and I say this with love for myself – I'm quite self-centred. I think I'm a generous person and a loving person [too]. But with kids, you just don't get to be self-centred. They strip you of it. And that’s an amazing gift. [Kids] are ultimately completely self-centred. They don't think about anyone else but themselves. So your self-centredness just has to park itself. And I think it's the great thing about parenting. At the heart of it, it's the most selfless thing you can do.”
Parenting is a subject Harington has thought about deeply, including how his own upbringing has shaped him as a father, and given him sometimes unhelpful tendencies or triggers he needs to overcome in order to be better at it. “If you find yourself getting hysterical, it's because it's historical,” is the mantra he uses, and it helps him spot when he is overreacting to the stresses of parenting, and shapes the way he and Leslie approach things.
None of this kind of self-reflection and growth would have been possible when Harington was drinking. He has spoken in the past of being a secret addict, an “asshole” and at times, suicidal. “I was so lucky I got sober before having kids,” he tells me, because at one time it felt “physically and emotionally impossible for me not to drink again.”
Does getting sober feel like his greatest achievement? “The very fact that I can be proud of it is an achievement,” he says. “Because before getting sober, I would stare in the mirror and call myself a cunt. I'd hate myself. I would literally despise myself and not be proud of anything I'd done. I couldn't be proud. So the fact that I am proud of getting sober is in and of itself a mark of being an entirely different person. And now, every set I step onto, whatever work I do, I'm proud of, because I know I put everything into it. Whereas before I had this huge monkey on my back that was just, like, weighing me down. So yeah, the whole nature of being proud of myself is a relatively new prospect for me.”
It suits him: family, sobriety, some hard-earned self-love. It’s coming through in his work in characters like Henry and Jim, and it’s coming through in our conversation, which comes to a natural close as the evening begins to imprint itself around us. Around the corner, along the canal, the sky is darkening, the pubs are filling up, and the joggers are going home to their families.
I ask Harington what happens next. “Look, I can't tell what the future brings,” he says. “I might have one massive, messy, chaotic relapse. And I hope that doesn't happen. But I think I protect myself by talking about it.” He believes it might help others, too, hearing from public figures like him “who had the same problem, and who are living a really, really genuinely happy, content life, and can't imagine going back to what I [would be] going back to.” In a world where many celebrities like to pay lip service to the #mentalhealth conversation but keep their own struggles hidden – particularly when it comes to addiction – I think he may be right.
As he stands up to go back to Leslie and their kids, I think of something Harington shared earlier in our conversation about where he was, where he is now, and why those places are – thankfully – so far apart. He’s was discussing his lack of a clear plan for his career, and his simple desire for longevity as an actor.
“If you've been the young male lead in something [like Thrones], and you could argue that I got given that opportunity because of my appearance, the worry is that that's all your worth is. And for me, the older I get, the more that drops away. The more I get to accept [that] no, I'm an actor. And I've been around for a while. And I'm still working. And so at some point, I have to accept that might have something to do with my talent as well.”
Industry season three will air in October on the BBC in the UK. It is currently airing on Sunday nights on HBO in the USA.
Styled by Angelo Mitakos
Tailoring by Faye Oakenfull
Grooming by Paul Donovan