One Nightstand With Kit Harington

Kit Harington stars in and serves as an executive producer of the new MGM+ series A Tale of Two Cities, but in another life the barrister’s wig he wears on the show might have been his everyday attire. “My whole family were barristers,” says the 39-year-old actor, who plays Sydney Carton, the boozy, charismatic, and wayward British lawyer who finds his character tested by a torrid love triangle. “I come from a long line, all the Haringtons, very legal.” Did his family ever see that path for him, too? “Not when they started looking at my grades, no,” he says, laughing. “My dad was like, ‘Not for you. No, you go be an actor.’”

His dad’s instinct was spot on. After leaving school, Harington trained at London's Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, then landed the lead role of Albert in the National Theatre’s War Horse, following it to the West End. This was, in some way, a family trade too. “My mum was a playwright, and so she took us to the theater a lot,” he says of his childhood, which began in west London before he moved to Worcester. “Performance was always there, and I wanted to do something that mum did. I was a complete mummy's boy.”

From the theater, he went on an eight-season run as Jon Snow in HBO’s Game of Thrones while simultaneously appearing in movies like Pompeii and Testament of Youth. He took a break from acting when the series wrapped in 2019, and when he returned to work, he was determined to do something different. “I remember after Game of Thrones, there was a number of a few years where I was like, ‘I don’t want to do any TV. I don’t want to do any long character arc or whatever,’” he recalls, noting that it was the HBO show Industry that changed his mind. “I’d missed it,” he says of the intervening period, in which appeared in the Marvel movie Eternals. “There’s something about taking a character over eight episodes rather than over a two-hour movie, which I find really deeply satisfying. And I also find the act of being in an ensemble deeply satisfying where it’s not two or three of you, it’s a larger group.”

With A Tale of Two Cities, he finds himself on familiar ground. “I always loved the book,” he says of Dickens’ 1859 novel from which the show is adapted. “I studied it at school and I think it’s a really special book if you can still love it after studying at school. The main reason to make A Tale of Two Cities, to adapt it, was that it really hadn’t been done since the ’80s. And myself and Dan West, my producing partner and very good friend, felt strongly that this was one of his most interesting works and that we were kind of slightly sick and tired of seeing Great Expectations or A Christmas Carol or Oliver.”

Part of what makes it so interesting is its relevance to today, he argues. “It’s a sweeping love story over two cities, but one of the cities is falling apart because of rampant inequality,” he says. “We felt that thematically, that backdrop was very kind of prescient for now. Are we on the cusp of that? Could we be blindly walking into some sort of revolution?”

Keep reading to discover four of Harington’s favorite books.

His first selection is 1984 by George Orwell, which Harington came to at a young age. “It made me intensely paranoid as a teenager and made me really truly believe that the world that he describes there is one that was just around the corner,” he says. “If you get really paranoid, you think, ‘Are we already in it?’ It politically activated me as a young person.”

The feeling still lingers. “Double Think is used all the time in our world right now, and it’s gotten worse, and I do think that the saying of one thing when the opposite is true and calling it the truth is terrifying,” he says. “I won’t list politically who I think is doing that, but I think we could all imagine someone…but politicians now will absolutely use Double Think. It has become an incredibly powerful tool that wasn't necessarily the case 10, 15 years ago.”

Harington chooses to stay off social media, as he’s “vehemently against it.” But from what he’s seen, there’s a striking resemblance between the way people act online and the ways that the citizens of Orwell’s fictional world react to propaganda films. “The public rage. They’re shown pictures of the enemy and they all work themselves into rages,” he says. “Just reminds me so much now of social media rages and how people are getting more and more worked up and outraged by things online.”

His second choice is Booker Prize winner Flesh by David Szalay. Told over the course of 50 years, readers follow a man named István from his working-class childhood in post-communist Hungary to the elite circles of London in adulthood.

“There’s something about it that I think really spoke to me as a man,” he says. “He is an ordinary guy, but you’re inside his head, and the way he’s written was incredibly powerful as to talking about how just blokes are… I think we’re sometimes categorized as unsensitive, but you read this book and you see some of the things he pays attention to. It’s written in such a male way, but a really beautiful unapologetic male way, which I loved.”

His next pick is Any Human Heart by William Boyd, which follows a man named Logan Mountstuart through several of the most important historical events of the 20th century. “I find it very hard to cry at things. Speaking of British upbringing, it’s the way we’re raised. It gets difficult on set — I just can’t push the tears out,” he says, joking. “I can manage it then sometimes, but this made me bawl at numerous points in it.”

The novel is written in the style of a diary, a medium Harington has tried several times. “I have tried really hard, but should just write it and not read it back,” he says. “I write it and I read it back and I go, ‘God, you’re a dickhead.’ And I stop writing it. I hate hearing my own thoughts on paper. I’m like, ‘Who do you think you are?’”

His final choice is the Harry Potter series, which has followed him through all stages of his life. “About eight years ago I got sober and I noticed once I got sober, I’ve always had this problem about going to bed,” he says. “This is very personal, but I used to drink myself to sleep because I hated that my brain would be so busy at nighttime. And so when I stopped drinking, I had to find a solution to this. And the solution was I listened to Harry Potter before going to bed.”

He continues: “Recently I lost my mum and it helped me through that. As huge and popular and ginormous and gigantic as it is, and maybe as uninteresting as it is for me to say, it’s played such an important role in my mental health.”

Harington will continue to build that connection when he plays Gilderoy Lockhart in Season 2 of HBO’s forthcoming Harry Potter series. But don’t expect him to spill any secrets. “I’m under so much lock-and-key,” he says. “It’s very early days in it anyway. But I will just say he’s a wonderful character.”

Watch the full episode below: