The movie Kit Harington admits he was “ashamed” to be underprepared for
There was no questioning his physical preparations, but when Kit Harington took on his first lead role in a major Hollywood blockbuster, his attention to detail and accuracy left him frustrated with his approach.
A Golden Globe and two-time Primetime Emmy nominee for his stint as Jon Snow on Game of Thrones, just like many of the other cast members who rose to prominence on HBO’s era-defining fantasy, it wasn’t long until offers started coming thick and fast for plum gigs on the big screen.
Game of Thrones marked his first-ever acting credit away from the stage, with Harington making his feature film debut in the critically-reviled video game adaptation Silent Hill: Revelation. For his second shot at cinematic stardom, he ironically signed on to headline a big-budget historical epic from a director who’d made their name bringing console properties to the screen.
Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil‘s Paul W.S. Anderson decided he’d try to broaden his storytelling and genre horizons with Pompeii, a dramatised and action-packed romance set against the backdrop of the titular town’s fateful proximity to Mount Vesuvius. The sole survivor of a village eradicated by Roman soldiers, Harington’s Milo begins the story as a gladiator fighting for the right to freedom.
For his part, the actor hit the gym “three times a day for six days a week” to bulk up and convince as a hardened sword-swinging warrior, with the washboard abs to prove it. However, while his chiselled physique wasn’t in question, he didn’t put anywhere near as much effort into discovering the facts behind the volcanic event that decimated Pompeii and made it a fixture of the history books.
He admitted to the BBC that he didn’t even visit the ruins until after shooting had already wrapped. “I’m ashamed to say I didn’t do a whole amount of historical research, I took the script as gospel,” he said, “But then I was pleasantly surprised to see that we were very historically accurate”. Or at least, they were in relation to the film’s status as an effects-heavy and entirely fictional love story played out against the backdrop of a genuine event.
That’s something he acknowledged, too, offering that “we’re a big-budget action movie and we’re bound to take historical liberties”, even if he claimed there weren’t many. Several historians disagreed, though, even if nobody was expecting Anderson – with a background almost exclusively in fantastical genre fare – to slavishly recreate the events building up to the eruption as if they’d been ripped straight from the past and transplanted onto the silver screen.
Regardless of whether he was ashamed of his flimsy research or not, Pompeii ended up as a commercial disappointment and a critical afterthought, but at least it was co-star Kiefer Sutherland who snagged the unwanted distinction of a Golden Raspberry Award nomination, and not Harington.
