Audition stories for films and movies can often be terrible, wild or hilarious, but I'm not sure I've ever heard an audition story that is quite as fitting as the one Kit Harington recently told. The actor explained how he nabbed the role of Jon Snow on HBO's hit drama Game of Thrones, and he gives a lot of credit to the fact that he showed up at the audition with a black eye, making him look like a pretty tough cookie. But according to Harington, it was all a series of unfortunate events.
In an interview with W Magazine, Harington said that the night before his big Game of Thrones audition, he was hanging around with a girl he was seeing at the time. They decided to eat at McDonald's, which turned out to not be such a great idea, because it led to Kit Harington getting into a fight with a Tormund Giantsbane or The Mountain-sized man. Here's the story:
It was late at night and there was no seats. I asked this guy and this girl he was with if we could sit at the same table as them. We sat down and quite quickly he started being really rude to the girl I was with, calling her names. He called her something like an ugly pig, or something worse. I got up and said, 'No no, you can't call her that, get up.'So I called him up for a fight, which I'd never done before. And of course he'd been sat down the whole time, so he got up and just kept going. And I realized at that point that I had to throw the first punch otherwise I'd look like a complete wimp, and I got battered. So, then I went to the Jon Snow audition with a black eye.
All's well that ends in black eyes, I guess. The actor ended up going to his audition the next day and beat out some other well known names for the part, including Sam Claflin, who later appeared in a slew of big franchise movies, including Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, several Hunger Games films, and both Huntsman movies. It's entirely possible that Kit Harington would have been exactly what the producers were looking for without that black eye, but the tough guy look no doubt made him a bit more memorable.
Either way, this story is certainly a lot more exciting than all of those white lies Kit Harington had to tell about the status of his character over the past year. If you'd like to hear more about how difficult it was to play dead for months and months, you can catch the full interview, below.
Game of Thrones has already been renewed for Season 7, which means Jon Snow and co. will certainly be back next year. Be sure to check out what we know about the upcoming episodes.
