Jon Snow, no! Kit Harington auditioned for Game of Thrones with a black eye — all because of a McDonald’s fight.
The hunky Brit, 29, got into an altercation with another customer at the fast food chain restaurant the night before his big screen test.
“I had been in a fight the night before. I got in this fight with this guy at McDonald’s … I was with this girl I was sort of dating at the time,” Harington recalled to W magazine in a new interview. “He quite quickly started to be really rude to the woman I was with … then he called her something like an ugly pig and I got up. I said, ‘No you can’t call her that, get up.’ So I called him up for a fight, which I had never done before.”
“He got up and he just kept [getting taller] and I realized that I had to, at that point, throw the first punch — otherwise I’d look like a complete wimp,” he added. “And I got battered.”
Harington may have lost, but his injuries proved to give him an edge during the audition for the HBO series. “So then I went to the Jon Snow audition with a black eye, which I think that man who punched me in the face may have helped me get the job,” Harington, whose Snow was anointed the King of the North in the season 6 finale, explained. “So, if you’re watching, thank you!”
Nowadays, Harington is romancing his former GoT costar Rose Leslie, who played his wildling love interest, Ygritte, on the show. The pair have been dating off and on since 2012 and made their red carpet debut as a couple at the 2016 Olivier Awards in London in April.
Last month, Harington revealed that he fell in love with Leslie while filming season 2 in Iceland. “Because the country is beautiful, because the Northern Lights are magical, and because it was there that I fell in love,” he told Vogue Italia. “If you’re already attracted to someone, and then they play your love interest in the show, it becomes very easy to fall in love.”
