Despite the maelstrom arising from the infamous series finale of HBO‘s prestige hit Game of Thrones, star Kit Harington says he took issue with viewers’ audacious petition to remake the ending “with competent writers.”
“That genuinely angered me,” the Industry actor told the New York Times in a new interview, defending the dark fantasy show’s creators and writers, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. “Like, how dare you? Sorry, that’s just how I feel. I think it was a level of idiocy that can only come about through social media.”
At the time of the eighth season’s release, Harington was in rehab and emerged shocked by the deluge of negative reactions to the show’s conclusion. Despite a record-breaking 19.3 million watchers who tuned into the finale, 1.86 million signed on to a Change.org petition to scrap the ending.
Throughout its run, the adaptation, as has been widely reported, eventually caught up with and surpassed George R.R. Martin’s source material novels, and the author has since expressed that his ending would offer a different resolution. Martin has offered sparing updated on his sixth installment, the long-delayed penultimate book The Winds of Winter, for some years now.
In 2024, Harington told GQ of his thoughts on the fan reaction to the much-contested series ender: “I think if there was any fault with the end of Thrones, is that we were all so fucking tired, we couldn’t have gone on longer. And so I understand some people thought it was rushed and I might agree with them. But I’m not sure there was any alternative. I look at pictures of me in that final season and I look exhausted. I look spent. I didn’t have another season in me.”
He added of the finale backlash specifically: “Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I think there were mistakes made, story-wise, towards the end maybe. I think there were some interesting choices that didn’t quite work.”
