Kit Harington says Game of Thrones final season made “mistakes”

Kit Harington has admitted that there were “mistakes” in the final season of Game of Thrones, saying some of the decisions were “interesting”.

The eighth and final season of the HBO show, which aired in 2019, received criticism from reviewers and fans alike, with many of the concluding arcs being condensed into a shorter runtime of six episodes.

In the ensuing years, there has been much talk about the rushed nature of the final season, and now Harington – who played Jon Snow – has offered his own thoughts on the conclusion in an interview with GQ.

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“I think if there was any fault with the end of Thrones, is that we were all so f***ing tired – we couldn’t have gone on longer,” he remarked. “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. 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.”

Despite stating how tired he was by the end of the show, Harington was due to reprise his role in a proposed spin-off, though showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss stated back in January that the project wasn’t in active development.

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“What I can tell you is it was HBO that came to me and said, ‘Would you consider this?’” recalled Harington of the shelved project. “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.’”

Game of Thrones seasons 1-8 are available on DVD and Blu-ray. House of the Dragon airs on HBO and Max in the US, and on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK.

Read more Game of Thrones news on our dedicated homepage

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