There aren’t a lot of actors who came out of the filming of Game Of Thrones without making at least a bit of headway on filling out their “cinematic war crimes” demo reels, with actors like Charles Dance, Lena Headey, and Emilia Clarke all getting to regularly engage in the kinds of acts that failed to violate the Geneva Conventions solely because that particular document is decidedly unimaginative on the use of big, fire-breathing lizards in warfare.
Pity poor Kit Harington, then, who, despite occasional dalliances with dishonor/assassinating his girlfraunt, mostly had to portray Jon Snow as the good guy whose job was to frown a lot while everyone else was getting up to some delicious badness. And Harington apparently felt the loss, noting in a new interview with Entertainment Weekly—tied to his new film Blood For Dust, in which he gets to play a genuine dirtbag, big handlebar mustache and everything—that “My heart goes out to people playing heroes. They’re fucking hard to play and to make interesting. It is more fascinating as an actor, I think, to empathize with someone deeply faulted and wrong, to try and find your way into why they are doing these things.”
Harington—whose post-GoT career has been notably quiet and fairly eclectic, other than that time he drastically didn’t launch himself into the MCU with a role in Marvel’s Eternals—says he’s been deliberately drawn away from playing any more stock good guys after so many years in the Snow mines. “If I look at the roles I’ve taken since playing an out-and-out hero in Game Of Thrones,” Harington noted, “I have to admit there seems to be some sort of pushback about playing a hero. I’m not so interested in heroic roles, and if I am, they have to be pretty anti-hero-ish…I think people who do it successfully, who play classically heroic roles, are very talented actors. But at the moment, I just find it more interesting looking for the fucked-up people.”