Game Of Thrones Star Kit Harington Defends Season 8’s Finale

The Microsoft Theater last night played host to Hollywood’s Emmy awards, celebrating the glitz and glam of small-screen entertainment.

From Game of Thrones to Fleabag, Chernobyl to RuPaul’s Drag Race, TV’s biggest shows were given their dues – and, in some cases, a shiny Emmy to take home – though it was ultimately Thrones that sparked much of the conversation online, not least because it marked the last hurrah for HBO’s fantasy saga, having ruled over the Emmys for the past nine years (and change).

But while addressing the supposed ‘controversy’ over Game of Thrones season 8, lead star Kit Harington offered his own two cents on the show’s mixed reception (and how he managed to avoid it altogether).

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 didn’t really affect us.

Despite the negativity surrounding Thrones‘ truncated finale, which consisted of six super-sized episodes as opposed to the regular 10, Kit Harington is firmly of the belief that the season 8 storyline was true to the characters “because [they] lived with them for 10 years.”

Of course, much of the blowback can be traced back to Daenerys Targaryen and Jaime Lannister’s respective arcs (Cersei and Brienne’s also have their fair share of detractors), which many considered to be ill-conceived and, frankly, rushed. But even if that is the case, Harington stands by his opinion that Game of Thrones‘ eighth and final installment remained true to its suite of characters, despite not watching the final season himself.