Kit Harington Lost It When He Found Out Jon Snow Kills Daenerys

Game of Thrones's finale was pretty polarizing, but even if the final season felt a bit like a sprint to the finish, there was one moment that even the most jaded fans could agree landed like a gut punch. After eight seasons of following Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, first on their separate journeys and finally as a couple, we watched Jon stab Dany to death in the finale, killing the woman he loved to save the realm.

HBO released a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Thrones with its documentary The Last Watch, which aired Sunday. It included footage from the cast’s table reads, and gave fans a glimpse of an emotional scene—the moment Jon Snow actor Kit Harington learned that his character would kill Daenerys.

"I was very shocked and surprised at certain events unfolding," he said of the moment during a Late Show appearance earlier this month, "and then I blubbed my eyes out. I cried."

Harington told Entertainment Weekly that he purposely didn’t read the script ahead of time so that he could learn the story’s resolution alongside his castmates. Daenerys actor Emilia Clarke, who’d already read her scripts, purposefully positioned herself opposite Harington during the table read, in order to have the perfect view of the moment he learned the truth. “He was crying,” she told EW, “and then it was kind of great him not having read it.”

The actor also knew the ending wouldn’t delight every fan. "I think it’s going to divide," he told EW in the same interview. "But if you track [Daenerys’s] story all the way back, she does some terrible things. She crucifies people. She burns people alive. This has been building. So, we have to say to the audience: ‘You’re in denial about this woman as well. You knew something was wrong. You’re culpable, you cheered her on.’"

Still, when Harington learned Daenerys’s fate, he was visibly emotional, holding his head in shock. Check out the clip below.

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