Marvel Studios is famously spoiler-phobic and goes to great lengths to keep details about upcoming projects as under wraps as possible. We’ve often heard actors say they can’t reveal anything in interviews or they’ll get shot by a hidden Marvel sniper. According to Eternals star Kit Harington, the studio doesn’t actually threaten its casts into secrecy, but they do keep things super-confidential during the casting process.
The Game of Thrones icon spoke with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show and opened up about the experience of landing the role of Black Knight, which he’ll play in this November’s Eternals. Harington revealed that he didn’t receive a script or even any pointers about his character from Marvel when he landed the gig, meaning he had to Google the hero himself to find out what was in store for him in the film.
“I just think it’s an aura, I think that there’s a kind of, like… you just know. No one tells you, no one says you can’t say anything,” Harington began. “First of all, I didn’t get sent a script, I just got sent ‘This is who you’re playing.’ And so I was like ‘OK,’ so I just had to Google the character, which is a hell of a way to kind of work out who you’re playing. I Googled him, and I was like, he’s a character called Dane Whitman, and I realized he has a sword and rides a horse, and I was like ‘I know this guy! I’ve been this guy!’ But actually he’s quite different.”
Like Harington says, there is a superficial similarity between Jon Snow and Black Knight, due to their shared medieval aesthetic, but Dane isn’t just a heated-over version of the Bastard of Winterfell. In the comics, Dane is the descendant of one of King Arthur’s knights, Sir Percy, who possessed a mystical sword known as the Ebony Blade. Whitman’s uncle Nathan Garrett had used the weapon to embark on a life of crime as the supervillain Black Knight, so it was up to Whitman to restore honor to his family.
Though not one of the race of Eternals, Dane will become entangled in a love triangle with Gemma Chan’s Sersi and Richard Madden’s Ikaris in the film. As directed by Chloe Zhao, Eternals is currently scheduled to release in theaters on November 5th. It’s been rumored that Harington could go onto star in his own spinoff movie as Black Knight at a later date.
