It’s been a long journey, but Game of Thrones is coming to a close. As the cast of the HBO series prepares to begin shooting their final episodes, Kit Harington is already looking forward to life after the series.
Speaking with Digital Spy, the man who plays Jon Snow admits, “Thrones is coming to the end at the right time for me, and everyone involved in it.” While the end is certainly sad news for fans that have come to love the characters that inhabit Westeros, production on the series is no easy task.
“There’s a lot of things you can’t do. I’m looking forward to finishing, and eight years is the right amount of time,” Harington says. “I wouldn’t want it to go on any longer than it has. I have other ideas I’d like to look at producing.” The producing side includes the upcoming BBC drama Gunpowder, which he produces and stars in.
It’s not just producing that has the actor excited, though. Rather, the opportunity to explore opportunities that the show’s busy schedule would otherwise keep him from being able to commit to. “It will be liberating, just the thought of having a whole year free,” he says. “You shoot for six months, but half of the projects you might want to do will have started shooting before that six months is over.”
Still, while he may find the impending end of the series liberating, he’s not taking the Game of Thrones experience for granted. Even now, this early in production of the final season, emotions are setting in. “I was exchanging emails with David [Benioff] Dan [Weiss] last night and we were all getting very soppy and emotional with each other,” the actor says of the Thrones showrunners.
As for the show’s fans, the end of Game of Thrones doesn’t necessarily mean the end of that universe on HBO. There are currently five different spinoff pilot scripts in development at the network.
The final season of Game of Thrones will premiere either in late 2018 or early 2019.
