Kill The Boy... Man... Let The Be Born!

He’s the face of television’s most obsessed-over show. His hair alone has more fans than most actors. But as Game of Thrones enters its second-to-last season, KIT HARINGTON faces a dilemma: To enter the next phase of his career, must he leave Jon Snow behind?

- Logan Hill

Kit Harington has bobble heads on the brain. “I have to approve a new one every day,” he says. “I’m not joking. I’m asked, ‘Are you happy with how this looks?’ I’m like, ‘It’s a fucking bobble head—what do you want me to say?’ ”

To be fair to the product designers, capturing in plastic the hirsute attributes that have become the obsession of Harington’s many millions of fans probably requires a level of attention reserved for conservators at the Louvre. And soon they’ll no longer have a live model: Harington is counting down the days until he can get a proper shave and a haircut. The time, as it happens, has nearly come: He has one last shoot day for the seventh and penultimate season of Game of Thrones, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For now, the scruffy face of one of pop culture’s defining franchises is sitting across from me in a back booth at a restaurant in New York’s East Village. He arrived smelling faintly of a freshly smoked cigarette and wearing celebrity camouflage: thick-frame glasses and a baseball cap, which is doing its meager best to contain his unruly jet-black mop.

The hair will soon disappear, along with, in 2018, the show that made Harington famous. But what will live on is the outsized, tormented spirit of Jon Snow, the frostbitten hero he’s played for the better part of a decade: the brooding bastard prince who’s lost everyone closest to him; who was stabbed to death at the end of season five and then resurrected in season six; and who will confront the possible annihilation of every living thing in season seven.