HBO’s awards darling Game of Thrones was once again in attendance at last night’s Emmys, where it scooped two prizes: Outstanding Supporting Actor for Peter Dinklage and, much to the surprise of anyone disappointed by season 8, Outstanding Drama.
It’s no secret that the truncated series finale garnered mixed reviews, with some viewers even going so far as to launch a petition calling on HBO to hit the hard reset button and redo season 8 from scratch – ignoring Thrones‘ sky-high budget, logistics, and common sense.
In all seriousness, a heated debate followed the eighth and final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, though it was one Kit Harington managed to avoid, largely because he hasn’t yet seen season 8 in its entirety.
I still haven’t seen the show…So that’s how I dealt with that controversy — I haven’t seen the final season but I know what it took to shoot it. It was hard and all of them put their love and effort into it. Controversy, I think for us, we knew what we were doing was right, storywise, and we knew that it was right for the characters because we lived with them for 10 years. Controversy for us didn’t really affect us.
Harington got a front-row seat to Game of Thrones season 8 – you know, having acted in the damn thing – so we imagine he has a general understanding of how things panned out. Hell, the actor even admitted to shedding a few tears upon reading the final script, itself the culmination of an eight-year saga of fire and blood.
Indeed, the fact that Harington was so deeply involved in the production of season 8, including the arduous night-time shoot for “The Long Night,” means he’s generally wary of engaging with the critical reception, as he told Esquire a few months ago:
Whatever critic spends half an hour writing about this season and makes their judgement on it, in my head they can go fuck themselves. Because I know how much work was put into this.
So, make of that what you will. Undeterred by season 8’s mixed reception, the Game of Thrones franchise will continue at HBO, what with two prequel series already incubating in the early stages of development, one of which (codename: Blood Moon) seems to be targeting a premiere in 2020.
