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Game of Thrones

SPOILER ALERT! If you haven’t watched the latest episode of Game Of Thrones, you should turn away … now!

Some Game of Thrones fans might have been thrilled to see Jon Snow behead the sniveling and duplicitous Janos Slynt on last week’s episode, “High Sparrow,” but the actor who plays Jon, Kit Harington, wasn’t comfortable shooting the scene.

In a recent interview with EW.com, Harington revealed what was going through Jon’s mind during the scene and what was rubbing him the wrong way about it as an actor. Harington told EW.com:

There’s a great juxtaposition there from when Jon’s captured Ygritte (Rose Leslie) [in season two] and he knows he should kill her but he can’t do it because he’s too good of a person. He had that moment again here. He’s thinking: ‘Can I kill a man in cold blood?’ And this time he does it. That’s a big change for Jon.

It’s a big moment for fans of the show, as well. In the same episode, Jon refuses Stannis Baratheon’s offer to be recognized as Ned Stark’s legitimate heir and Lord of the North. However, Jon proves that he is truly Ned Stark’s heir in the moment that he takes it upon himself to execute Slynt for his treason with his own sword.

Of course, while beheadings (and stabbings and flayed men) are commonplace in the high stakes fantasy world of Game of Thrones, they are deeply disturbing in our own media. Harington added that the scene was particularly difficult for him to shoot because it coincided with the images of ISIS beheadings that saturated the media last autumn.

Harington explained, “It felt really dark because of the current news, what was going on in the news at the time…. It really didn’t sit well.”

What do you think? Did Game of Thrones go too far? [Where to Stream Game of Thrones]

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