Bidding farewell to Jon Snow when Game of Thrones comes to an end next year will be 'liberating', says the show's star Kit Harington.

“[Game of] Thrones is coming to a very quick end, which I am feeling quite emotional about. I like doing whatever I like doing and luckily this was a piece that, if it had been sent to me, rather than me being in it from the start, I would have genuinely wanted to do it,” he said.

“It’s coming to an end at the right time for me and everyone involved. It will be liberating. Just the thought of having a whole year free. Eight years is exactly the right time. I wouldn’t want it to go on any longer."

Harington is back in period costume for his latest role in the BBC's Gunpowder, which airs on Saturday. 

We learn about it in school, and we mark it each year with fireworks and a bonfire, but is there much more to the notorious Gunpowder Plot than we know?

“There really is,” says Harington. “Guy Fawkes was the tip of the iceberg. Many people know he worked with plotters, but don’t know much more about who they were or what their motives were. And so little is known about the lead-up to the night of November 5, or what happened after it.”

Gunpowder - a three-part TV dramatisation of the plot to blow up the House of Lords in 1605, largely filmed in Bradford and Keighley - tells the whole story, says Kit, best known as Jon Snow in Game of Thrones.

“In so many dramas on TV you see anonymous bad guys without a narrative - what we’re trying to do is tell the story from the plotters’ perspective as well, to try to understand what pushes people to do horribly violent things. We wanted to tell a story from both sides,” he added.

“The story follows such a fascinating, dark and twisted piece of British history which is very close to being forgotten in the fog of time. It goes far beyond the name Guy Fawkes and examines many fascinating characters and their desperate, tragedy-strewn lives. Gunpowder is all about choices, and the reasons desperate men make such choices, and it makes for really great drama.”

The popular actor had good reason to take on the role of Robert Catesby, the man who led the failed attempt to blow up the House of Lords and kill King James I - Catesby was Kit’s ancestor.

“My mother’s maiden name is Catesby and my middle name is Catesby, so way back when we were thinking about doing this piece I knew I wanted to be in it, but I didn’t know if I wanted to be Fawkes, Catesby or which of the plotters,” he said. “It just so happened that Catesby was the one that fitted.”

Gunpowder, which also stars Liv Tyler, Mark Gatiss and Peter Mullan, was filmed at locations including Bradford College’s Garden Mill building, Dalton Mills in Keighley, and historic East Riddlesden Hall. The Bradford City of Film team helped with location filming and the cast and crew stayed in Bingley and Saltaire during the four-month shoot earlier this year.

Kit says the story of the Gunpowder plot resonates with issues in today’s society; the notion that people are driven to extreme forms of behaviour. “It’s one of the reasons we’re making this. We don’t want to make a historical drama that has no resonance with today - we absolutely want to make a drama that people will relate to when they watch, I think all historical drama should be that,” he said.

Referring to the violence portrayed in the drama, he added: “We can’t avoid the torture that these men went through, we can’t avoid the executions that the people around these men suffered. I think it’s wrong when showing a torture scene or execution scene to shy too far away from the reality of it. I think audiences will accept a greater level of violence, so long as it’s justified.

“I’ve always felt, for example, if you take [Game of] Thrones, the violence is justified because unlike so many things, we see how it affects people. If you see someone die, you see the effect it has on the person who’s killed them and on the people around them. I think as long as it’s not gratuitous for no reason. It was definitely not gratuitous in this.”

He may be back in period costume for Gunpowder, but Kit is planning to ditch the cloak and sword when Game Of Thrones finally draws to a close next year.

  • Gunpowder starts on BBC One on Saturday.