From Jon Snow to a WWI soldier.
This is Jon Snow like you’ve never seen him before!
ETonline caught up with Kit Harington, who many know (or know nothing) as Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, as he embarks on a new role in a much smaller-budget film Testament of Youth.
“It was quite a nice adjustment actually,” said Harington. “It was filmed in such a different way to something like Game of Thrones, which is massive on scale and you can have anything up to five cameras each of them needing its own attention and that takes a long long long long time. This was much more simplistic it was a much smaller budget it felt more personal.”
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In the film, Harington portrays Roland Leighton, a British poet and soldier during World War I. Harington’s research on Leighton including reading the letters and poems that were sent back and forth between he and Vera Brittain during that time – and though playing a historical person can be a bit daunting, 28-year-old Harington says getting back into the mind of a 19-year-old was the tough part.
“I think that was the major toss for me was playing someone who was much younger that myself,” said Harington. “Trying to experience that youth again was interesting but quite tricky.”
And while Kit gives a rousing performance as Leighton, its Alicia Vikander’s emotional performance that takes the film home. The 26-year-old actress recently made waves in Hollywood for her breakout performance as the artificially-intelligent Ava in Ex Machina and Harington couldn’t help but gush about his co-star.
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“Alicia was in every single scene in this movie pretty much and it's a total force of acting it's an incredible performance,” said Harington. “You should see it for that if for nothing else.”
Vikander plays real-life Vera Brittain, a writer and pacifist who was engaged to Leighton during World War I. A year after the war began, Brittain left her life-long dream of an education at the University of Oxford to serve as a VAD nurse.
“It is a remarkable story about youth and people who grew up at a time where all their dreams and hopes were put on hold because of [World War I],” said Vikander.
Testament of Youth is out June 5.