Poor Jon Snow, he never gets a break does he?
First he’s born a bastard, has his whole family murdered, the gets murdered himself and is finally brought back to life, just in time to go to war with a psychopathic bastard with a penchant for skinning people alive.
And it seems that the actor who plays everyone’s favourite ex-lord commander, Kit Harington, is just as unlucky with Game of Thrones‘ showrunners pulling pranks on him.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, David Benioff and Dan Weiss admitted to pranking Kit by tricking him into believing that Jon would suffer hideous burns, which would disfigure his beautiful face and ruin his raven hair.
The book, Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones: Seasons 1 & 2 reveals the fake script they wrote:
Jon plunges his hand into the fire, seizes the burning drapes, and FLINGS them at the dead man, engulfing them both in flames. . . . When the fire is finally out, we see by torchlight that all of Jon’s hair has burnt down to the scalp.
The skin on the top half of his face has been melted in the extreme heat, blistered and pustulant. Despite what must be the extreme agony of permanent disfigurement, Jon stands stoically by his master’s side. . . . Jon smiles, his teeth shining brightly in his destroyed face. Mormont, sickened, has to look away
Weiss apparently told Kit that HBO were worried that Jon’s story was a bit ‘Harry Potter’ and they wanted make it bit darker.
Harington was quite prepared to lose his beloved locks for the scene and only learned it was a joke when he turned up on set ready to film his fake burning.
Weiss said:
We kept this up until we started laughing… He was a remarkably good sport about the whole thing.
Good thing they didn’t play the prank on Iwan Rheon, who plays Ramsey, then things may have had a darker ending…
More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.
Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.
He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.