The HBO shows “Industry” and “Game of Thrones” aren’t that different. We distract from high fantasy with sex and violence; the other, high finance, sex and drugs.
But there are no Jon Snow-like heroes in “Industry,” and everyone is horrible to varying degrees. Kit Harington’s character, Sir Henry Muck, is a privileged and needy tech boss. Despite this, Harington has a soft spot for him.
“He’s really trying to do good,” Harington said in a recent interview, leaning back in a chair in his east London home. “His inherent privilege puts blinders on him that he can’t do anything about, but it means he takes from the system more than it gives.”
“But he doesn’t intend to,” Harington said. “He wants to give more than he takes.”
Harington isn’t exactly what you’d expect of a superstar actor. On set, he struggles to learn everyone’s names. During the photoshoot before the interview, he made sure everyone had coffee.
Mickey Down, who wrote “Industry” with Konrad Kay, said he was hesitant to bring “HBO royalty” into the series, but enjoyed subverting expectations. “He was an honorable character in a really dishonorable world,” Down said of Jon Snow, “and so we said, ‘OK, let’s make him a really dishonorable character trying to be honorable in a dishonorable world.'”
Down and Kay adhere to a simple rule: If an actor is good, they give him more to do. Harington still has a lot of growing up to do in the final season of “Industry,” which airs on HBO on Sundays.
Last season, we met Muck at the height of his pride, running a collapsing energy company that needs to be bailed out by the British government. This brought Muck face to face with his first major failure. In the second episode of the new season, he is back, broken and depressed.
Harington depicts a lost man, wandering like a ghost on his stately estate. There are elements of humor as he leans over a piano playing Purcell in an embroidered silk robe or sulks at breakfast next to a huge plate of sausages. But the episode is also intensely dark. At its peak, Muck’s depression becomes dangerously worse.
“He’s a very brave actor,” Down said of Harington. “I imagine going to dark places for some actors is quite tricky.” It was one of those performances, Harington said, where “the dial goes into the personnel.”
Harington said he understands Muck because, in some ways, they are similar. Both are products of the British aristocracy: Muck is a lord and Harington’s father is a baronet. The Haringtons have their own coat of arms and can trace their lineage back to royalty and the creator of the flush toilet. His maternal ancestor, Robert Catesby, attempted to blow up his paternal ancestor James I during the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
Unlike Muck, however, Harington experienced the decidedly British paradox of being posh but not rich. He grew up in the unglamorous London suburb of Acton before his family moved to the countryside as a teenager. His love of theater came from his mother, playwright Deborah Jane Catesby, and Harington said he fell in love with theater after watching a production of “Waiting for Godot.”
Harington went to a public school. Her mother was a socialist, Harington said, and didn’t like the idea of private education – even if she did, the family couldn’t afford it. He remembers meeting young Henry Mucks from a nearby private college, whom he hated, even envied. There was “something about my family history that made me feel like I should be at one of those schools,” Harington said.
Regardless, Harington rose to the top of his profession. He landed the lead role in “War Horse” at the National Theater while still at drama school, before being drawn into “Game of Thrones” in 2009. Harington and Henry Muck enjoyed their early successes – which, in both cases, fueled perilous peril.
Go up and down
In April 2019, a week before the final season of “Game of Thrones” aired, Harington stood behind a stage door, seconds away from hosting “Saturday Night Live.”
At that time, Harington was universally recognizable as the dashing King in the North from “Game of Thrones” and the face of a new Dolce & Gabbana perfume campaign. But behind that door, everything collapsed. Harington remembered a strange feeling invading his consciousness, the feeling of being “dragged around places.”
Various problems had precipitated this moment. First there was the alcohol. At this point, Harington was a “dry drunk”: a sober but not recovering alcoholic. Second, it was exhaustion. He was exhausted from filming and endless press engagements. A few nights before, his “Game of Thrones” co-star John Bradley had seen him walking in the elevator of their New York hotel. “He could barely form a thought,” Bradley recalled. “He could barely say a sentence.”
Standing outside the “SNL” door, Harington realized he had lost control. “I have no choice but to do this,” he remembers thinking. “SNL” producers insisted that he appear on the show clean-shaven, he said, which he didn’t like: Not having a beard made him feel ugly and naked.
Somehow he held on. His jokes were self-deprecating, centered around disappointing film projects. (“I was also in a movie called “Silent Hill: Revelation 3-D.” Anyone a fan?”) He concluded his monologue by saying that after 10 years of working on “Game of Thrones,” he was “can’t wait to see what comes next.”
What came next was an expensive rehabilitation center in Connecticut.
Harington had struggled with addiction since drama school, but it came to a head in 2018 while he was working in London on a Sam Shepard play called “True West,” directed by Matthew Dunster. Harington played Austin, an alcoholic. During a technical rehearsal, he took Dunster aside and told him he needed some time off. Dunster said that until then, he had no idea Harington was in trouble. “His background,” Dunster said, was “a very private thing.”
For a decade, “Game of Thrones” had swept Harington’s life like a great wave. He fell in love on set with his co-star Rose Leslie, whom he later married. (They have two children.) The series brought him fame and wealth, but he also had trouble escaping Jon Snow.
The final season of “Game of Thrones” aired while Harington was in rehab. When he came out, he was shocked by the negative response. He had worked hard filming that season — one battle scene took 55 straight nights to film, according to Harington, who was present for about 40 of them. The final episode reached a live audience of 13.6 million people, but almost two million people later signed a petition calling for it to be remade “with competent writers”.
“It really made me angry,” Harington said, because he knew how much effort the show’s writers, David Benioff and DB Weiss, had put into it. Harington added. “Sorry, that’s exactly how I feel. I think it was a level of stupidity that can only happen through social media.”
After the show ended and his rehabilitation was complete, Harington took a year off. Then, just as he was finally ready to act again, the pandemic arrived.
When things picked up after lockdown, Harington told his agent he wanted a “no sword” rule for vetting potential jobs. Then Marvel came knocking, asking him to play a superhero called Black Knight in “The Eternals.” He agreed, but the frankness didn’t have much impact. In 2021, he toyed with the idea of bringing Jon Snow back to life, for a spin-off, but ultimately walked away from development.
Harington landed a few film roles, but his most prominent work was in the theater. He played Henry V (wielding a gun, not a sword) and starred in the West End transfer of Jeremy O. Harris’ “Slave Play.”
Then, in 2023, Henry Muck arrives in his inbox.
Tears of joy
Harington is careful to indicate that people shouldn’t feel too sorry for him. While he was in rehab, he learned some strategies to manage his anxiety. Vaping gives him an excuse to flee the room if things get uncomfortable. And writing gratitude lists helps him stay focused on the positives. About a month ago, he recalls, he was making one on the way to Heathrow Airport when he started crying.
They were tears of joy. He cried about how his life had gone. Harington is now a family man who loves his children, his parents and his wife. Even his beloved soccer team, Manchester United, shows glimmers of its former glory. For her next big role, Harington plays Sydney Carton in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.”“, is expected to air this year on MGM+.
“I think this is the life he was always destined for and always wanted,” said Bradley, his “Game of Thrones” co-star, “even when life was crazy.”
Today, Harington said, sitting in his big house full of children’s toys and family photos, he felt like “one of the luckiest people in the world.”
As the interview drew to a close, Harington had his own question for the reporter. “Tell me,” he asked, “what is the interesting thing you find about me.”
Harington is interesting in many ways: he’s surprisingly vulnerable, likes to play the clown, he’s unpretentious. But above all, he is an example of a rare life, where, thanks to a mixture of luck and skill, things fell into place perfectly. After that, he had to find out what can go wrong when everything seems to be going well.
