- The final season of “Game of Thrones” may be the shortest yet at just six total episodes, but star Kit Harington says filming the season was incredibly grueling.
- “Everyone was broken at the end,” Harington told GQ Australia. “I don’t know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending or if we were crying because it was so f—— tiring. We were sleep deprived.”
- Production for this season took longer than any other thanks to the epic scale of the plot.
- The eighth and final season of “Game of Thrones” premieres this April.
Ten years have passed since Kit Harington first auditioned for the role of Jon Snow on HBO’s mega-hit series “Game of Thrones.” As the final season approaches, Harington is now ready to move on from the grueling filming schedule of the series that felt “designed to break” the cast.
“Everyone was broken at the end,” Harington said in a new interview with GQ Australia. “I don’t know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending or if we were crying because it was so f—— tiring. We were sleep deprived.”
Though the final season will only be six total episodes (as opposed to the usual 10), those episodes are reportedly going to each run over 60 minutes. The shooting time for this season, between filming and post-production, was the series’ longest ever.
Read more:Everythi ng we know about the final season of ‘Game of Thrones’
“I remember everyone walking around towards the end going, ‘I’ve had enough now. I love this, it’s been the best thing in my life, I’ll miss it one day – but I’m done,'” Harington told GQ Australia.
Harington’s exhaustion could be partially due to the intense battle scene filmed over multiple months. After early reporting said this battle took 55 days to shoot, Entertainment Weekly’s James Hibberd revealed that the 55 days were just for outdoor night shoots.
“Filming then moved into the studio, where [director Miguel Sapochnik] continued shooting the same battle for weeks after that,” Entertainment Weekly reported.
According to the GQ Australia profile, Harington shared his last day on set with the main crew and cast, but then returned for one more scene that involved “a bit of green-screening,” as GQ’s Tom Lamont puts it. This could mean anything, but it’s worth noting that Emilia Clarke films her scenes of Daenerys flying on Drogon with a green screen backdrop.
Harington was 22 years old when he first auditioned for “Game of Thrones” (while sporting a black eye) and now he’s 32 and married to his co-star Rose Leslie, who played Jon Snow’s wildling love Ygritte.
Read more:A complete timeline of ‘Game of Thrones’ stars Kit Harington and Rose Leslie’s real-life love story
The eighth and final season of the series premieres sometime this April. Though HBO hasn’t released an official trailer for the season yet, we did get our first peek of footage in a new 2019 teaser for the network. While we wait for more, you can read our predictions for what will happen on these last six episodes here.
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