Kit Harington Details Rehab Stay During Game of Thrones' Final Season

Emilia Clarke Sets the Record Straight on Game of Thrones Salary

Kit Harington needed a reset.

The Game of Thrones alum—who portrayed bastard-born Jon Snow for all eight seasons of fantasy show—got candid about how he checked himself into a rehab facility following the premiere of the HBO series’ eighth and final season in 2019.

“The first thing I did while the show was airing was go to rehab,” he told his costar Peter Dinklage during a recent conversation for Variety’s Actors on Actors series published June 5. “That was my first port of call. It was a very weird experience, Peter. Like, I decided to go to rehab as episode one was airing. And I was there for six weeks, isolated, without my phone.”

“I needed to go get sober,” Harington—who married his costar Rose Leslie in 2018 before welcoming two kids in the years since—continued. “I needed to get my head on straight.”

As for the timing of his rehab stay, the Eternals actor said the fact that it coincided with the premiere of season eight was pure coincidence.

“Actually, that was a big pull to not go to rehab was like, ‘Well, wait a minute, there's loads of press that needs to be done, you need to be front and center,” he continued. “And it was a good decision to go, ‘Do you know what? Actually, I'm checking out. I can't do this.’”

John Nacion/FilmMagic

And while Dinklage quipped that actors will do “anything to get out of press,” eliciting a laugh from Harington, he then admitted missing the press tour was indeed “a real relief.” His stay, however, meant he missed the release of the show’s final season.

Afterwards, Harington decided to take a year off of acting “to get sorted,” only for the COVID-19 pandemic to hit right when he decided to “re-engage with work in a very kind of considered way.” The result, he explained, made for a “very strange” period after Game of Thrones ended and his next set of projects.

However, he wouldn’t change a thing.

“Looking back, it's been really very good for me,” Harington reflected. “Because it allowed me the time post that show finishing to figure out in some ways not to be too wanky, but like who I was. And whether I really wanted to do this anymore, kind of like talking bluntly. Like, ‘Do I love this still?’”

HBO

The Industry star has also come to realize how much playing Jon Snow impacted him, too.

“I'm very proud of the work I did but I was pulling a lot, because of where I was in my life, purely from pain,” Harington continued, adding to Dinklage, “Actually, one of the things I've realized since finishing is looking at what you were doing so naturally of pulling from joy and pain at the same time and mixing those together and that's a really satisfying place to work. But it was that joy I needed to discover post-Game of Thrones.”

For more celebrities who have been candid about their sobriety journeys, read on.

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