Game of Thrones star Kit Harington sounds like he’s done playing Jon Snow for good, having spend a decade as the Northerner who knows nothing.
While Game of Thrones finished several years ago, George R. R. Martin’s fantasy franchise is still going strong — with even more spin-offs on the way. But despite previous plans for a Jon Snow series, it now sounds like Harington has parted ways with the character for good.
“No, god no,” Harington told Variety, when asked whether he’d reprise his old role again for an audiobook version. “I don’t wanna go anywhere near it. I spent 10 years doing that. Thanks, I’m alright.”
Harington recently recorded the role of Gilderoy Lockhart for Audible’s Harry Potter audio drama adaptation, prompting the question of whether he would ever reprise his role for a similar audio version of Game of Thrones. Harington’s response — that he doesn’t want to go “anywhere near” the character he once played to do so — seems pretty definitive.
Following Game of Thrones’ dramatic conclusion in 2019 — which saw Jon Snow survive but head back north, following his devastating decision to stop Daenerys — George R.R. Martin confirmed HBO was working on a Jon Snow spin-off with the working title “Snow.” According to Martin, Harington was developing the series with his own team.
But despite lengthy conversations around the show’s direction, Harington ultimately revealed that the project was no longer moving forward. “Currently, it’s off the table, because we all couldn’t find the right story to tell that we were all excited about enough,” Harington said last year. “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.”
During a Game of Thrones fan convention in 2022, Harington hinted that his spin-off would focus on his character’s struggle to overcome past traumas off the heels of season 8’s finale. “He’s gotta go back up to the place with all this history and live out his life thinking about how he killed Dany, and live out his life thinking about Ygritte dying in his arms, and live out his life thinking about how he hung Olly, and live out his life thinking about all of this trauma, and that, that’s interesting,” Harington said at the time. Cheerful.
In a separate interview last year, Harington also reflected on how sequels to popular shows were historically harder to develop, as they relied on existing cast returning. “You run into a lot of issues with a sequel,” he said. “A lot of the cast are done with it by then. So, who are you bringing back? Are you bringing back the same people?
“With ours, it was just about not finding the right story and not finding something that was worth doing, to bring me back to it and to stay in it. It just made less sense, the longer we went on with it, so we recanted.”
But while Harington isn’t returning anytime soon, HBO has big plans to continue the Game of Thrones universe. Last month, it laid out a Marvel-style slate for the coming years, and confirmed it had already renewed upcoming spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for a second season in 2027, ahead of its first season debut on January 18, 2026. House of the Dragon Season 3, meanwhile, debuts in summer 2026, with Season 4 set for 2028.
Image credit: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
