This post contains spoilers for the final season of Game of Thrones. Consider yourself warned.
It’s been three months since HBO aired the series finale of Game of Thrones and many people, including the show’s cast, are still processing the fates of their favorite characters.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Kit Harington who played Jon Snow, finally reveals how he felt about the decision to have Jon kill his lover/aunt Daenarys (Emilia Clarke) after she went “mad” and unleashed dragon fire across huge swaths of King’s Landing.
Harington went into the final table read for season eight without having read the ending, with Clarke warning him that he was in for a surprise. “I didn’t realize what was going to happen the whole way through until maybe half a page before Jon kills Dany. I remember my mouth dropping open and looking across Emilia at the table, who was slowly nodding as I went, ‘No, no, no!'” he said. “It was a ‘holy f*ck’ moment, pardon my language. Jaw dropping. I was completely surprised by it, even though you can kind of see the path through the season of how it was getting there—and even the previous couple of seasons before that, once you can look back. But it was still a big shock to me.”
He says they shot the scene where Jon stabs Dany for almost three weeks, but that it was important to really get it right. And while Jon’s decision was a tough one, Harington saw the logic in his character’s choice. “But what it really comes down to, the real crux of it, is the decision is made when she puts it between her and his family,” he explained. “Jon essentially sees it as Daenerys or Sansa and Arya, and that makes his mind up for him. He choose blood over, well, his other blood. But he chooses the people he has grown up with, the people his roots are with, the North. That’s where his loyalties lie in the end. That’s when he puts the knife in.”
While many fans took issue with how the show ended, Harington disagrees.
“I loved it. When I read it [Jon leading the Free Folk back to the North], that bit really made me cry. What really made me cry was on the paper: ‘End of Game of Thrones,'” he said. “But as far as an ending for Jon Snow, this character that I loved for so many years and had grown so close to, and had meant so much to me … seeing him go beyond the Wall back to something true, something honest, something pure with these people he was always told he belongs with — the Free Folk — it felt to me like he was finally free. Instead of being chained and sent to the Wall, it felt like he was set free. It was a really sweet ending. As much as he had done a horrible thing [in killing Daenerys], as much as he had felt that pain, the actual ending for him was finally being released.”
