Many times, a dude will say something dumb or offensive, and we’ll yell at him and then the story ends and it’s rarely brought up again. So it was with Kit Harington, who spent much of 2014 through 2016 saying many dumb words about how he knew the struggles women faced because he too was the victim of double standards and sexism. You see, Kit struggles because everyone thinks he’s so beautiful and ripped and could you just stop looking at his ripped, oiled-up body calling him a hunk? Yes, it was a bad phase. But here’s something sort of nice: Kit learned some of the right lessons from that phase. He actually listened to the criticism of “Kit Harington Says Words” and those criticisms changed his perspective, and changed the way he talks about sexism and objectification. It’s not the most ideal situation, but it’s a start. Kit gave a lengthy interview to the Guardian, which was published last weekend. Some highlights:
On playing dumb characters: “I love playing a thicko,” he says, then corrects himself, in case anyone is offended. “That’s probably an incredibly terrible term, thicko. But, you know, someone who is wonderfully well-meaning, but isn’t… I’ve always been the kind of person who’s well-meaning but slightly vacant at times.”
He doesn’t want to be treated like a dumb guy though: “Because you don’t want to be defined like that. There’s an element that I can get, ‘Ahhh, sweet Kit, little Kit.’… And I’ve worked very hard against that. I don’t want to be patronised.” Do people patronise him? “No, I don’t think so. If they do, you shut it down pretty quick.” He grows so quiet that it’s hard to hear him. “You have to stand up for yourself. But I won’t go into that.” He takes a deep breath, and shuts himself up. “Mmm.”
On his comment, last year, that there’s “sexism against men”: “I was wrong there, though,” he shrugs. “Sexism against men is not something I should have really said. I think what I meant was, being objectified. At that time, I did feel objectified, and now I’ve learned how to control that.” How? “Just shutting it down. Look, I do think men can get objectified. I do feel I have been objectified in the past, sexually as well, in pieces that have been written about me. Has that made me feel uncomfortable in the past? Yes. Do I think my position is the same as a woman’s in society? No. They’re very different things, and I should have separated them. I was wrong.”
He plans on sending his kids to state-schools: “Um, they get brought up in London, hopefully, and see a very multicultural society, and hopefully go to a state primary school, and have the first 11 years of seeing the city I love. Then get the beauty of going to the country and being given space and air, and have the beautiful halcyon memories that I have. It’s the sense of space, the big open sky, that in those years can be good for thinking and emotions.”
While his background is aristocratic, he didn’t grow up rich: “Mum and Dad didn’t have the money to send us to private schools, first and foremost, but second, they wouldn’t have wanted to. They believe in the state system, they believe in the NHS, they believe in state education, and they’ve instilled that in me.” He says his upbringing was privileged – “I was very middle class: not loads of money, not no money” – but that he’s not quite what you might think he is. “One’s family history is one thing, and I’m very proud of my family history, but it doesn’t directly speak of who I am.”
On the debate about private-school actors versus working class actors in Britain: Harington is keenly aware that there’s an ongoing debate about working-class access to the arts, and to acting, but thinks we’re kicking the wrong target by criticising Etonian actors rather than drama cuts. “There has to be more effort put in at an educational level, to give people those opportunities. Let’s face it, Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, they are very good actors who deserve to be where they are, and they got there because their educational systems recognised their talent. That needs to happen [in state schools].”
Does this really show that Kit has grown as a man, that he’s learned from his mistakes? Or does it show that a publicist finally got ahold of him and told him that he should stop trying to equate his struggle to that of oppressed women around the world? I think it’s a little bit of both – he’s “growing up” and becoming more aware of structural inequities between women and men, and some of those realizations are probably coming from a publicist yelling at him.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
Whatever it is, good for him. He does know some things after all.
Time will tell the difference here
Yeah.
Well.
He’ll get a great education in it when he doesn’t look like that any more, and can’t get any roles because his acting stinks.
I agree! I never saw him as hot and his actor is awful so I just don’t ‘get’ him at all.
He demonstrates very little range as an actor so far, but I almost never make predictions about show business, expect as the wise commenters below have noted, someone is going to say something really stupid.
I don’t mind his words. I hold a unilateral and stereotypical view of celebrities…that they’re vacuous, narcissistic apers. And reading their ‘viewpoints’ on anything, really, exacerbates those feelings which oddly satisfies some sick part of me lol.
You made me laugh because I can understand that! *cringes*
This all day *giggling demonically*
I like him at the moment because he’s playing Catesby in a BBC drama about the Gunpowder Plot that portrayed the execution of a woman by peine forte et dure, which caused the British Twatter to go into outrage meltdown.
This may be a superficial (and somewhat worrying) reason on my part.
I hope some of these ‘Thrones actors realise that once the show is over they’re not going to get the same grace they had when it was on the air.
A lot of them have said painfully dumb things interviews when the public really wants to like them. Kit is one of these.
So I hope this is a sign that his PR people and agent realise that the honeymoon’s over when the show ends – and no, cute newlywed stuff from him is not going to cover it, tbh.
He’s said this sexism against males ish one time too many. He might also want to drop the not posh angle it’s overplayed and unconvincing, esp. now he’s marrying a legit blueblood.
He needs a new PR script.
He and Emilia are particularly embarrassing, but Sophie Turner’s pretty bad too. Maisie Williams is a spoiled brat as well.
The worst part is that they THINK they’re smart, too, which just exacerbates it all.
But the writers of the show are downright sickening, particularly Bryan “The sex became consensual” Cogman.
@WENDYNERD exactly!!!!!
Yep, those are worst offenders, tbh. (Though I have side-eyed a few others.)
Ack, the apoplectic rage induced by Cogman’s black wedding commentary excuse-fest is not something I wish to revisit, and am actively repressing. Still waiting for D&D’s day to come too, tbh.
“…they THINK they’re smart, too, which just exacerbates it all.”
That’s the worst part; it literally makes me wonder if they’re so much in their own private bubbles that they missed their (other acting) peers getting dragged for the very same kinds of quotes.
It’s nice that Kit got a clue this time and corrected himself on this point but I doubt it means much beyond that.
@FF The worst part: that wasn’t a quote about the Black Wedding thing, but the Jaime/Cersei thing. Not only did they refuse to learn from that (D&D themselves his from comic con that year), but he and one of the other writers told Sophie Turner that she’d be getting a “love interest” that season. Then he framed the Black Wedding as a “hardened woman making a choice”. To get raped.
I do not under stand why people don’t call the writers out on what legitimately grotesque misogynists they are…. because ARYA and Dany kill people and feminism = murder apparently. They haven’t had a woman in the writer’s room in six years and they literally (not figuratively, literally) use rape as scenery. Like, they are horrifying human beings.
The “became consensual” bs quote was from Alex Graves, the director of Breaker Of Chains. Cogman may have added his two cents at some point but that quote is Graves’.
The “a hardened woman making a choice, and she sees this as the way to get back her homeland”, quote is Cogman though, and the biggest pile of utter tripe ever. It’s the lying about the reasons for that plotline that ticked me off more than anything:
If you listen to the D&D commentary for the (re-shot) pilot one of the things you’ll notice is how zelously they point out that the girl sitting next to Sansa in the Great Hall is Jeyne Poole. They were literally so hot to trot with that Ramsay wedding night scene/storyline from day one that they made sure the victim/character existed in order to make sure it would occur at a future point when they didn’t even know if a second and third season would happen yet. That’s how fixated the showrunners were on that.
So listening to Cogman spout line after line of transparent excuse after excuse trying to weakly justify forcing Sansa into a plotline she didn’t belong in (and did not need or require in any way for her story) while derailing the conclusion of Theon’s (three seasons of gratuitous torture) arc with Ramsay just because the showrunners had their mind set on said rape scene since the pilot but didn’t want to cop to just utterly ticked me off – amongst other things (long list when it comes to D&D tbh).
It’s not just the adding of gratuitous non-con to an already rapey af universe that signposts where D&D’s interests lie, it’s the removal of the female characters with greater agency from the books. I question why Arianne Martell disappeared, why the Dornish characters and plots were so deliberately hackneyed even after being totally rendered unrecognizable/vapid; no Lady Stoneheart; Tulisa (Jeyne Westerling in the book) killed off; there are others whom I forget/neglect to mention but my point is if you need to remove those characters yet can find time to add noncon scenes to the remaining female characters, the interests of the people who have control of those decisions are pretty self-evident.
Just looking as how fast they reversed the positions of the female allies/rulers (within episodes) that had come to power at the end of S6 was also very telling.
He really downplays his privileged upbringing. Also, Rose Leslie was born in and grew up in a Scottish castle!
I’d say he is upper middle class, middle class has a different meaning in Canada and the US.
Class is complicated. It is both culture and money. My dad grew up wealthy, and even though my parents had middle class incomes when I was growing up (teacher and reporter) I still was occasionally immersed in that super WASPy world and absorbed certain ways of speaking and a certain confidence about my place in the world. And then my grandfather paid for college so I have no debt, etc. So I have both a reflexive hatred of super preppy, wealthy people and an ability to be totally comfortable in that world.
Saw him in Spooks and he was laughable as a spy! Too small, crazy hair and he just can’t act!
If they ever do a show about the government needing to infiltrate a gang of manual typewriting, goat milk drinking, shoe-cobbling hipsters hellbent on world domination, he would be perfect for the part. He could bring his own skinny-jean wardrobe and the production would save some money on the costume department.
Hilarious!!
I think he corrected himself fairly well. I remember at the time feeling like he was entitled to feel that he’d been objectified, but was wrong to equate it with what women experience, and he seems to have figured that out. So good for him.
I read the interview at the weekend and I thought he came over as a decent bloke and, refreshingly, didn’t try and deny his privilege unlike the Hidmaynebatches who would have us believe that their public school/ Oxbridge/ RADA backgrounds are merely incidental to their success. As I read it he wasn’t denying his middle class privilege but if he did go to state schools and find success I think that is different to his aforementioned contemporaries.
I also do think actors are in a bind in interviews as they want to come over as honest and witty and smart etc but also know that a fraction of an interview can be used as the subject for an opinion piece. As a minor example he spoke about the original pilot, 90% of which was changed, and the Sun ran a story with something along the lines of “Game of Thrones filmed a secret episode that will NEVER be seen on TV”.
I appreciate this. Especially in this climate where we’ve seen a history of people saying very tone-deaf and outright idiotic things, we always sit back and say “STFU, you don’t get it, your privilege shields you, you need to learn, etc., etc.” and it’s true. All of it. However, I worry that when people make those strides to be better it’s rarely met with any kind of acceptance. Honestly, I don’t know if they mean it, if it’s genuine, but I’m not sure I really care. What I do care about is that I feel as though these admissions of wrongness and trying to correct behavior has the power to reach other people, to tell them it’s ok to change your mind, to admit you were wrong, to try and see things from a different perspective. In a perfect world celebrities and their opinions would have little (if any) affect on the general public, but we know that is certainly not the case. Therefore, any time a celeb who has possibly contributed to negative/faulty belief systems is willing to come forward and own those faults it sends a message to their fans. Debating genuineness and authenticity can really take away from the benefits of encouraging other celebs to follow suit. Now, if they continue a pattern of bad behavior and venture down the road of hypocrisy we should absolutely call them out. But for now, today, I’m glad he is publicly saying “I was wrong”.
I’m inclined to overlook his “words.” He didn’t go to school to study law/public policy/government/sociology. He studied acting. And he can’t help his family background. Why reporters insist on asking actors questions of substance that aren’t related to their craft is beyond me.
Don’t take it back, Kit!! Don’t cave to societal pressure!
His publicist needs a raise!
Am I the only one who thinks he looks like a young, albeit slim, George Costanza?!? Not hot at all.
he especially does here!
He was right the first time. He is more objectified than most normal women will ever be. After the game of thrones finale there were thousands of tweets about his bum. In the game of thrones finale they used his nakedness to cover up Emilia Clarke, so Kit Harington has definitely experienced the other side of the coin. If you have experienced objectification, does it really matter what your gender is? Your experience is still your own experience, being male or female doesn’t change your own personal experience.
He was definitely right the first time, but he was using the wrong words. He kept saying sexism when he what he really meant was objectification, which made it sound all sorts of wrong. I hate to jump all over the guy for not being super-precise, but the choice of a single word in conversations like this can mean a lot. Someone must have pointed that out to him, because he’s starting to pick the right words.
It’s like actors who come from a privileged background saying they have been discriminated against because they are posh. Coming out of the mouth of wealthy, public school-educated actor that sounds laughable and scorn-worthy, but if they said they have experienced bias in the industry rather than discrimination or prejudice, that probably comes far close to what they are trying to describe.
Just to point out, he’s only saying he’ll send kids to primary state schools (which is like American grade school) but the comment about then sending them to the country makes it very clear that he’s thinking boarding school for secondary (middle and high school in the US) which will be public (i.e. private to the rest of the world) school.