Game of Thronesstar Kit Haringtonmade it no secretas he made the media rounds promoting the show’s final season: playing Jon Snow for a decade had taken its toll.
Those struggles reached a head following the conclusion ofThrones’ eighth and final season earlier this month, with Harington, 32,checking into a wellness facilityto tend to “personal issues.”
“Kit has decided to utilize this break in his schedule as an opportunity to spend some time at a wellness retreat to work on some personal issues,” Harington’s rep said Tuesday in a statement to PEOPLE.
Kit Harington.Helen Sloan/HBO
The star has been receiving psychological coaching and behavioral therapy to help him deal with and manage stress and “negative emotions,”Page Six reported, adding that he’s in a “luxury rehab for stress and alcohol use” in Connecticut that runs $120,000 per month.
But he’s also made headlines for partying in the past. In January 2018, he wasescorted out of a New York City barafter allegedly getting into a drunken disagreement over an interrupted pool game. And shortly before shooting season 3, he broke his ankle while trying to climb into the window of his London flat when he lost his keys following a night of drinking.
“Everyone always says you must have done it on set horse riding or running across glaciers or something cool,” Harington toldEntertainment Weeklyin 2013. “I was an idiot. The ‘invincibility of youth’ and all that. I couldn’t even blame it on a film set. And I had avoided skiing for ages because I thought I’d break my ankle!”
Mike Coppola/FilmMagic
The star alsorecently told PEOPLEthat his preferred way to wind down after filming was a trip to the pub with his costars.
“You never want to do much after a day’s filming, other than sit and like debrief about something else,” he said in a March interview with PEOPLE. “Remember like, with any filming crew or anything, it’s not just your other castmates. There’s a whole family there that you can gossip and talk about. It’s a little world unto itself, and that’s what we’d end up doing, is going to the bar and chatting s—. It’s like any job, isn’t an office job like that? Except your day happens to have been, like, running around a muddy field with a sword.”
The decision to seek treatment comes after Haringtonopened upabout just how much filming the series affected him, particularly after his character was killed off during the season 5 finale in 2015 (only to be resurrected the next season.)
Jon Snow in the season 5 finale.HBO
“It was probably one of the darkest periods I have been through in my life,” he toldemmy magazinein March. “I think it must have had something to do with being a walking cliffhanger: I didn’t enjoy it. You want to be a lead, and then you get all the spotlight of the biggest show in the world onto you for a few months. It’s very disorientating, and weird, and unpleasant in many ways.”
Harington said the idea of celebrity soon started making him “worried” and “anxious,” tellingVarietyin March that he felt “very vulnerable.”
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Harington began therapy, he said, as he’d felt “very unsafe” and was not speaking to anyone about it.
The actor also describedthe challenging production cycleofThrones’ final season.
“The last season ofThronesseemed to be designed to break us. Everyone was broken at the end,” he toldGQ Australiain January. “I don’t know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending of if we were crying because it was so f—ing tiring. We were sleep deprived.”
Harington did not read the finale’s script prior to the final table read, andhis emotional reactionwas shared in the two-hour documentaryThe Last Watch.
In it, he audibly gasps and removes his glasses to wipe away tears as he learns Jon is the one to strike the fatal blow to his on-screen lover Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke).
The tears came again when it came time to actually film his final scene.
“I felt fine…. I felt fine… I felt fine… Then I went to do my last shots and started hyperventilating a bit. Then they called, ‘Wrap!’ And I just f—ing broke down. It was this onslaught of relief and grief about not being able to do this again,” he toldEsquirein April.
Helen Sloan/HBO
Harington was focused on the future in hisMarch interview with PEOPLE, saying that all he’s thought about is what comes next for his career.
“I think people expect you to think about the new season coming out or reminiscing… no, we’re thinking about the future,” he said. “I always wanted the moment where this all comes out on DVD and I can put it on the shelf. And I do that, I look at it, and I go, ‘Done.’ That’s the bit I’m looking forward to.”
source: people.com
