Kit Harington can't wait to wash Jon Snow right out of his hair
Game of Thrones fans are used to seeing their favourites hacked down on screen, but for many of Kit Harington's admirers the cruellest cut will come once the show has already finished shooting.
The 31-year-old actor said plans to trim back the long, flowing hairstyle he maintained to play brooding hero Jon Snow since the HBO series first began filming in 2010.
As soon as filming wraps on the fantasy saga's eighth and final series, Harington will be cutting his hair short. How short? "Short-short," the star told Entertainment Weekly.
“I’d like to step away and enjoy the obscurity, cut my hair, make myself less recognisable as the character, and go do and some other things with a completely new look and tone,” he said.
“The beard will be harder to get rid of – I quite like the beard. I like having the long hair and beard both, but it will be like ritualistic thing. I can’t go into my next role looking the same. This role was brilliant, but I’ll need to get rid of Jon Snow.”
Game of Thrones stars out of character
This isn't the first time Jon Snow has had a close shave with close shaves. While filming the first series, Game of Thrones' head writers David Benioff and Dan Weiss tricked Harington into thinking his hair would be burnt away in an action scene, by writing a fake script which included the line "we see by torchlight that all of Jon’s hair has burnt down to the scalp".
But his flowing locks remained unscathed, and as the show's popularity grew it inspired requests for "Jon Snow" cuts at high-end hair salons. The character's distinctive hairstyle has been praised as an "unlikely breakthrough beauty trend" by Telegraph Beauty Director Katy Young, who praised the actor for singlehandedly "making the man-perm a thing."
Harington may be keen to put the haircut behind him, but he will always have a reminder of it in his wedding photographs; the "man-perm" will still be intact when he marries his co-star, Ygritte actress Rose Leslie, this Saturday.
