Do Game of Thrones producers see Kit Harington as the star of the show?

Kit Harington, the apparent poster boy for this season of Game of Thrones, stopped by Good Morning, America this morning for yet another interview in advance of Sunday’s fifth season premiere. Apart from the revelation that his interviewer is a bit of a dork about the show, the session didn’t yield many new nuggets of information, at least not at first glance. They talk about the fact that a lot of people die on the show (file under the column marked ‘duh’), Harington reiterates that he’s read the books but was still surprised by some of the things that happen this season, and that this year he’s only read the parts of the scripts that relate to Jon Snow.

What’s more interesting to me is that, counting this interview, Harington seems to have done a lot more press than his fellow cast members. We’ve got the interview where he talked about Jon Snow’s “emotional constipation,” the one where he expounded on his haircut, his winningly funny appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, and the one where he claimed that he really did “know nothing” about the upcoming season. And we didn’t even write about the interview where he said it was demeaning to be called a ‘hunk.’ All of the cast members are called upon to do press ahead of the premiere, of course, but Harington is outpacing them.

Why the press gap? It could be that the Game of Thrones producers are pushing Harington because they see him as the “star” of the show, or at least wish he could be. Game of Thrones is an ensemble drama with a ton of characters, many of whom are involved in complex plotlines. That makes for engrossing TV, but it can tough to market. Harington may represent an opportunity to provide the show with a pretty, amiable, talk show-ready frontman. After all, of all the cast members, Harington has made the most strides towards movie stardom, what with his starring roles in Pompeii and his upcoming part in Spooks: The Greater Good. Whether or not those movies are any good, they give him some name recognition, which makes him attractive for marketers.

I don’t have a problem with this thinking so long as it doesn’t affect the ensemble nature of the show itself, but there is a more sinister explanation for Harington’s ubiquity, one that involves death, darkness, and SPOILERS. Lots of SPOILERS, in fact, so stop reading if you don’t want to be exposed to any.

To understand this angle, let’s go back a year to the press blitz the preceded Season 4. Jack Gleeson, who played King Joffrey Baratheon (aka the guy voted most likely to be simultaneously murdered by several dozen people he’d pissed off), was on the press train. Like Harington, he was giving a lot of interviews, so many that it was starting to look suspicious. Joffrey, as you may know, was bumped off early on in Season 4, poisoned at his own wedding. It’s likely that Gleeson was pushed so aggressively in the pre-season so Joffrey’s death would land with a big impact, and it’s possible that the same thing is happening with Harington and Jon Snow.

We can’t know what’s going to happen this season, of course, especially since it’s poised to overtake the material from the books. However, we do know that Jon is stabbed at the end of A Dance with Dragons, a cliffhanger that has yet to be resolved. Are producers readying us for his abrupt and lasting death? Time will tell, but I hope I’ve given everybody something to be nervous about.

• Published on 04/08/2015 at 2:00 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT