Kit Harington described filming intimate scenes with Sophie Turner for their horror film The Dreadful as “gross,” considering their shared history on Game of Thrones.
“It was weird,” Harington, 39, shared during a recent conversation with fellow Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage for CNN’s Actors on Actors.
The two actors, Harington and Turner, 30, essentially grew up together on the set of Game of Thrones, portraying Jon Snow and Sansa Stark, respectively. Throughout most of the series, their characters believed they were siblings, only to later discover they were cousins.
Their close relationship both on and off the Game of Thrones set made it uncomfortable when Turner invited Harington to play her love interest in The Dreadful. Turner not only starred in but also produced this gothic horror film, in which Harington played a mysterious figure returning to the lives of Anne and her mother-in-law Morwen.
“She sent me the script and I said, ‘Sophie, there’s a lot of us getting it on,’” Harington revealed. “She hadn’t seen that. She just said, ‘Yeah, Kit would be good for this part.”
Harington initially hesitated to accept the role in The Dreadful because he had “known [Turner] since she was a child” and thought of her as “a younger sister.”
“We did it. It was gross but it was fine,” he insisted. “She’s an amazing actor. I know we all know that but she was a child when she [started on Game of Thrones]. She is phenomenal!”
Sophie Turner, Kit Harington in “The Dreadful.” Lionsgate /Courtesy Everett Collection
Turner shared during an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers last year that she was similarly unsettled by the idea of filming romantic scenes with Harington.
“I’d just got the script for this amazing gothic horror called The Dreadful, and I was reading through all the characters,” she explained to host Seth Meyers. “And I’m producing it, so the director was asking me, ‘Who do you think?’ And immediately, the first person I thought of was Kit.”
She continued, “So, I sent the script to Kit, and he kind of sent me a message back going like, ‘Yeah, I’d love to, but this is going to be really f***ing weird, Soph.’ And I was like, what is he talking about? Then I was reading it, and I’m like, ‘Kiss, kiss, sex, kiss, sex scene.’ And then I’m like, oh shoot, that’s my brother. But it’s such a good script that he’s like, ‘We kind of have to do it.’”
When it comes to filming sex scenes for TV shows and movies, actors have had a variety of good and bad experiences. Intimacy coordinator Brooke M. Haney previously opened up to Us Weekly about how filming steamy scenes between actors goes down on set. Contrary to what some fans may think, Haney said that it […]
Turner joked that the great script for The Dreadful didn’t make filming the love scenes any less awkward.
“We put it out of our minds, and then we get on set, and it’s the first kissing scene,” she recalled. “And we are both retching, like really, it is vile. It was the worst, another really bad moment in my career.”
The Dreadful was released in February.
