The HBO shows “Industry” and “Game of Thrones” aren’t that different. One distracts from high fantasy with sex and violence; the other, from high finance with sex and drugs.
But there is no Jon Snow-style hero in “Industry,” and everyone is varying degrees of awful. Kit Harington’s character, Sir Henry Muck, is a privileged, needy tech boss. Despite this, Harington has a soft spot for him.
“He genuinely is trying to do good,” Harington said in a recent interview, leaning back on a chair in his East London townhouse. “His inherent privilege puts these blinkers on him that he can’t help, but they mean that he is taking from the system more than he’s giving.”
“But he doesn’t mean to,” Harington said. “He wants to give more than he takes.”
Harington isn’t aloof like you might expect a superstar actor to be. On set, he makes an effort to learn everyone’s names. During the photo shoot before the interview, he made sure everybody had coffee.
Mickey Down, who wrote “Industry” with Konrad Kay, said he was hesitant to bring “HBO royalty” onto the show, but enjoyed subverting expectations. “He was an honorable character in a really dishonorable world,” Down said of Jon Snow, “and so we were like, ‘OK, let’s make him into a really dishonorable character trying to be honorable in a dishonorable world.’”
Down and Kay adhere to a simple rule: If an actor is good, they give them more to do. Harington has a lot more to do in the latest season of “Industry,” airing on HBO on Sundays.
Last season, we were introduced to Muck at the height of his hubris, helming an energy company that collapses and has to be bailed out by the British government. That brought Muck face to face with his first major failure. In the second episode of the new season, he’s back, broken and depressed.
Harington portrays a lost man, wandering like a ghost inside his manorial estate. There are elements of humor when he hunches over a piano playing Purcell in an embroidered silk robe or sulks at breakfast next to an enormous plate of sausages. But the episode is also intensely dark. At its climax, Muck’s depression escalates dangerously.
“He’s a very brave actor,” Down said of Harington. “I imagine that going to the dark places for some actors is quite tricky.” This was one of those performances, Harington said, where “the dial goes into the personal.”
Harington said he understood Muck because, in some ways, they are similar. Both are products of the British aristocracy: Muck is a lord, and Harington’s father is a baronet. The Haringtons have their own coat of arms and can trace their lineage back to royalty and the creator of the flush toilet. His maternal ancestor Robert Catesby tried to blow up his paternal ancestor James I during the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
Unlike Muck, however, Harington has experienced the decidedly British paradox of being posh but not rich. He was raised in the unglamorous London suburb of Acton before his family moved to the country in his teens. His love of theater flowed from his mother, the playwright Deborah Jane Catesby, and Harington said he fell for acting after watching a production of “Waiting for Godot.”
Harington went to a state school. His mother was a socialist, Harington said, and didn’t like the idea of private education — even if she had, the family couldn’t afford it. He recalled encountering young Henry Mucks from a neighboring private college, whom he hated, envied even. There was “something in my family history that made me feel like I should be at one of those schools,” Harington said.
Regardless, Harington soared to the top of his profession. He landed the lead role in “War Horse” at the National Theater while he was still at drama school, before being swept into “Game of Thrones” in 2009. Harington and Henry Muck rode early successes — which, in both cases, stoked a perilous crash.
Rising and falling
In April 2019, one week before the final season of “Game of Thrones” was set to air, Harington was standing behind a stage door, seconds away from hosting “Saturday Night Live.”
At that point, Harington was universally recognizable as the dashing King in the North from “Game of Thrones” and the face of a new Dolce & Gabbana fragrance campaign. But behind that door, everything fell away. Harington remembered a strange feeling invading his consciousness, a feeling of being “dragged places.”
Various problems had precipitated that moment. First, there was the booze. By that point, Harington was a “dry drunk”: an alcoholic who’s sober but not in recovery. Second was exhaustion. He was burned out from filming and from endless press commitments. A couple nights previous, his “Game of Thrones” co-star John Bradley saw him wander into the elevator of their New York hotel. “He could barely form a thought,” Bradley recalled. “He could barely speak a sentence.”
Standing there in front of that “S.N.L.” door, Harington realized he had lost control. “I have no choice but to do this,” he recalled thinking. “S.N.L.” producers insisted that he present the show clean-shaven, he said, which he disliked: Having no beard made him feel ugly and naked.
Somehow, he held it together. His jokes were self-deprecating, centered on underwhelming film projects. (“I was also in a movie called ‘Silent Hill: Revelation 3-D.’ Anyone a fan?”) He concluded his monologue by declaring that, after 10 years working on “Game of Thrones,” he was “excited to see what comes next.”
What came next was an expensive rehab facility in Connecticut.
Harington had struggled with addiction since drama school, but it came to a head in 2018 while he was working in London on a Sam Shepard play called “True West,” directed by Matthew Dunster. Harington was playing Austin, an alcoholic. During a technical rehearsal, he pulled Dunster aside and said he needed some time out. Dunster said that, until then, he had no idea Harington was struggling. “His rock bottom,” Dunster said, was “a very private thing.”
For a decade, “Game of Thrones” had carried Harington’s life like a great wave. He’d fallen in love on set with his co-star Rose Leslie, whom he went on to marry. (They have two children.) The series brought him fame and wealth, but he was also finding it hard to escape Jon Snow.
The final season of “Game of Thrones” aired while Harington was in rehab. When he emerged, he was shocked by the negative response. He had worked hard shooting that season — one battle scene took 55 consecutive nights to film, according to Harington, who was present for around 40 of them. The final episode reached a live audience of 13.6 million people, but almost two million later signed a petition calling for it to be remade “with competent writers.”
“That genuinely angered me,” Harington said, because he knew how much effort the show’s writers, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, had put in. “Like, how dare you?” Harington added. “Sorry, that’s just how I feel. I think it was a level of idiocy that can only come about through social media.”
With the show wrapped and his rehab completed, Harington took a year out. Then, when he was finally ready to act again, the pandemic arrived.
When things started up again after the lockdown, Harington told his agent he wanted a “no swords” rule for vetting potential jobs. Then Marvel came knocking, asking him to play a superhero called Black Knight in “The Eternals.” He agreed, but the franchise didn’t make much of an impact. In 2021 he toyed with the idea of bringing Jon Snow back to life (again), for a spinoff, but eventually stepped away from development.
Harington landed a couple of film roles, but his most significant work was in the theater. He played Henry V (wielding a gun, not a sword) and starred in the West End transfer of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play.”
Then, in 2023, Henry Muck landed in his inbox.
Tears of joy
Harington is careful to indicate that people shouldn’t feel too sorry for him. While he was in rehab, he learned some strategies to deal with feeling anxious. Vaping gives him an excuse to flee the room if things get uncomfortable. And writing gratitude lists helps him stay focused on the positives. About a month ago, he recalled, he was compiling one of those on the way to Heathrow Airport when he started weeping.
They were tears of joy. He was weeping at how his life had panned out. Harington is now a family man who loves his children, his parents and his wife. Even his beloved soccer team, Manchester United, is showing glimmers of its former glory. For his next big role, Harington is playing Sydney Carton in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” set to air this year on MGM+.
“I think that’s the life he was always destined for and always wanted” Bradley, his “Game of Thrones” co-star, said, “even when life was crazy.”
Now, Harington said, sitting in his large house full of children’s toys and family photos, he felt like “one of the luckiest people alive.”
As the interview came to a close, Harington had a question of his own for the reporter. “Tell me,” he asked, “what the interesting thing is you find about me.”
Harington is interesting in many ways: He’s surprisingly vulnerable, enjoys playing the clown, he’s unpretentious. Most of all, though, he’s an example of a rare life, where, by some mix of luck and skill, things fell perfectly into place. After that, he had to learn about what can go wrong when everything appears to be going right.
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