Fifteen years after ‘Game of Thrones‘ first hit screens, its two biggest stars have finally explained something that changes how you see one of the show’s signature acting styles. In a reunion chat for Variety’s Actors on Actors series, Kit Harington and Peter Dinklage looked back on the very first scene they ever filmed together, and what they admitted is almost funny enough to be made up. Jon Snow‘s famous brooding stillness wasn’t some deliberate directing choice or character trait. It was stage fright, plain and simple.
That scene with Dinklage was Harington’s first ever on-camera role, and he was scared out of his mind. He’d come up almost entirely through theater and had no clue what acting for a camera was even supposed to look like. So he made up his own rule right there on set. His logic was that if he just stood still, said his line, and went quiet again, nothing could go wrong.
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Harington, however, watched Dinklage do the total opposite. Dinklage already had film credits under his belt, including ‘Elf,’ ‘Penelope‘ and ‘Death at a Funeral,’ and he was moving around, using his hands, really working the scene. Watching that, young Harington’s nerves turned into judgment. He figured the more experienced actor across from him just wasn’t very good. Looking back now, Harington said he remembers thinking his co-star was overacting, calling him, in his head, a “ham.”
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Dinklage doesn’t fight the label at all. When Harington told him this story to his face, Dinklage just laughed and agreed that he was “Overacting. Bad acting. Being a ham.” It’s the kind of joke that only lands because everyone knows how ridiculous it is. Dinklage went on to win four Emmys for that exact acting style Harington briefly wrote off as amateur hour.
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Naturally, the story ends up somewhere kinder. Harington now understands that what looked like wild overacting was actually just skill, an actor with way more camera experience using his whole body instead of hiding behind stiffness. He said he eventually figured out the 57-year-old wasn’t overacting at all. Dinklage was just far more seasoned than he was, and that his own trick of freezing up so nothing could go wrong was really just fear pretending to be a choice.
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Harington admitted, “And then I realized, no, you were just so much more experienced. I was like, ‘Just freeze. If you freeze, nothing can go wrong.’ ” Dinklage, being a good scene partner, gave Harington an easy way out too. He pointed out, “Jon Snow can be sort of a frozen character. Tyrion is a bit more fun than Mr. Killjoy. Mr. Do the Right Thing.”
It’s a fair point. One actor was playing a duty-bound bastard always trying to do the noble thing, the other was playing a sharp-tongued dwarf lord who talked his way out of every jam. Of course, their instincts on camera looked nothing alike.
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What really stands out, all these years later, is how little bitterness is left in the story. Elsewhere in the same conversation, the two laughed about freezing together in a barely heated tent during the show’s earliest, cheapest seasons, back when the leads didn’t even get separate trailers. That’s a long way from the massive show “Thrones” eventually became.
Both stories point to the same thing, really. Two young actors thrown into an unproven fantasy pilot, each quietly convinced the other one was doing it wrong, and both wrong about almost everything except how much they still had to learn from each other.
Fifteen years on, the ham jokes are basically the warmest kind of confession there is. It is proof that even the actor who came to define stillness once thought the opposite of it was a mistake.
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