The closest thing Game of Thrones has to a Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins would probably be Jon Snow: a warrior who slowly but surely learns his epic place in what eventually becomes a story of grand scale.
Coincidentally, much like those three characters, it’s no mystery that Jon Snow—and, thusly, actor Kit Harington, who plays him—is not a particularly statuesque man. But what, exactly, is his height? The question has been both pondered and investigated through the years, particularly when photographed with cast mates both tall—Gwendoline Christie, who plays Brienne of Tarth, is listed at 6’3” on IMDB—and short—Emilia Clarke, who plays Danyrys, is reportedly 5’2”.
In an extensive new interview with Esquire, Harington didn’t beat around the bush, revealing that the show felt the need to prop up his height for key battle sequences. “Plus, I was in fucking high heels,” he said while discussing his experience filming a Season 6 episode. “I’m short and they need me to look taller than other people, so I’m carrying fifty pounds in high heels.”
The English actor was specifically discussing his experience filming the epic battle in the episode “Battle of the Bastards,” which saw Jon Snow lead the Stark army against Ramsay Bolton, a key GoT villain. Harington said that the costume that he was wearing in the episode weighed 33 pounds itself, and the sword that his character wielded added another four pounds-and-change to the total schlep.
On a related note, Harington also pointed out that Sophie Turner and Isaac Hempstead-Wright, who play Stark siblings Sansa and Bran, respectively, were just children when the show first started filming, and have since surpassed him in the height department. Turner, in particular, messes with Harington in a way that he once did to her. “Sophie and Isaac grew past me! Each year, they’d come back and they’d just be taller,” he said. “I’d go from looking down at them to looking up at them. Now they pat me on the head. I used to pat them on the head, ruffle their hair. Now Sophie ruffles my hair.”
Filming the entire “Battle of the Bastards,” Harington said, took two weeks. While it was grueling, he was also quick to point out the dividends that the routine paid. “You’d have about a week or two where your body went into shock, going, I can’t, I’m knackered,” he said. “But you just kind of get into it and your muscles build up, and it was actually quite a good workout every day. You didn’t need to go to the gym.”
As if there wasn’t any other reason to be excited for the final season of Thrones, this nugget was offered up, just for scale. “The Battle of the Bastards,” Harington said, took two weeks to film. “To give you a comparison,” he teased, “this year we have a battle that took six weeks.”
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