Industry Season 4 marks the return of Kit Harington’s Henry Muck, but once upon a time, the actor navigated a very different (but no more cutthroat) corner of HBO on Game of Thrones. Now, nearly seven years after the fantasy series took its final bow, Harington is reflecting on the charged response to the Thrones ending.
More Than A Bad Review
In 2019, the massively popular series (adapted from George R. R. Martin’s novels of the same name) ended on a controversial note: with many fans decrying the so-called character assassination of Daenerys Targaryen — and then her actual assassination carried out by Harington’s Jon Snow.
As noted in a recent New York Times interview with Harington, nearly 2 million people signed a viral petition that called showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss “woefully incompetent,” and asked for HBO to remake “a final season that makes sense.”
Harington was “genuinely angered” by this, he told the outlet in his profile published on Jan. 11. “Like, how dare you? Sorry, that’s just how I feel. I think it was a level of idiocy that can only come about through social media.”
Jon Snow’s Game Of Thrones Future
Despite the show’s polarizing finale, Harington’s fan-favorite character might have helmed his own spinoff series, which was announced to be in development in 2022. But ultimately, that project did not pan out.
“In development, you look at every angle, and you see whether it’s worth it,” Harington explained to Screen Rant in 2024. “And currently, it’s not. Currently, it’s off the table, because we all couldn’t find the right story to tell that we were all excited about enough. So, we decided to lay down tools with it for the time being. There may be a time in the future where we return to it, but at the moment, no. It’s firmly on the shelf.”
As for HBO’s current Game of Thrones prequel series, House of the Dragon, Harington hasn’t tuned in — and doesn’t plan to. “I just can’t watch it … I spent too long there,” he told AP. “And I wish them all the best, and I hear it’s wonderful and going really well. But I don’t think I’ll ever watch that show, and I don’t think I’ll watch Game of Thrones again for a very many years. It’s taken a few years to put it in the rearview. I’m still unsure whether it is fully in the rearview mirror. I think it takes a long time.”
