Kit Harington unamused by petition to rewrite Game Of Thrones ending

A 2019 Change.org petition asking to remake season 8 "with competent writers" pissed Jon Snow's actor off.

By Drew Gillis  |  January 11, 2026 | 5:39pm
Photo by Michael Tullberg/FilmMagic
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Kit Harington unamused by petition to rewrite Game Of Thrones ending

The ending of Game Of Thrones in 2019 was, and has remained, controversial. You may recall the backlash after “The Bells,” the series’ penultimate episode in which Danaerys levels King’s Landing and its inhabitants for, uh, reasons. The episode was disliked enough to spawn a Change.org petition to remake season 8 “with competent writers” that has received nearly two million signatures. (The petition is still live, if you were curious; people have still left comments within the past few months.) This was something that was obviously never going to happen—the season was among the most expensive seasons of television ever produced—but it certainly sent a message. And it was one that Kit Harington did not appreciate.

“That genuinely angered me,” the Jon Snow actor says in a new profile in The New York Times, which notes that he defends the show’s writers, D.B. Weiss and David Benioff. Harington, obviously, put a lot of his own sweat into the project; the Times reminds that filming “The Long Night” took 55 consecutive nights of shooting. “Like, how dare you?… Sorry, that’s just how I feel. I think it was a level of idiocy that can only come about through social media.” 

The interview points out that this backlash happened at what was already a tumultuous time in Harington’s life. As was reported at the time, the actor had checked himself into a rehab facility in Connecticut as the final season was beginning to air. NYT journalist Miles Ellingham writes that Harington was “shocked by the negative response” to the season when he checked out. Harington was at one point attached to a potential Jon Snow spinoff series, though that was shelved back in 2024. 

 

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