Game Of Thrones Actor Kit Harington Starred In One Of HBO's Best Comedies

Last year everyone was talking about how "Challengers" was the best movie ever made about a tennis match, but little did they know HBO had already beaten that film to the punch. The 50-minute long HBO comedy special "7 Days in Hell" had the same basic structure: It showed us the main event of an intense tennis match, and it jumped back and forth through time to explain why the match was so important. "7 Days in Hell" even managed to outdo "Challengers" in the bisexual representation department. "Challengers" could only imply that a threesome happened at the end, but "7 Days in Hell" actually showed it. 

It's strange how overlooked "7 Days in Hell" is these days, because the cast was star-studded. Not only was Andy Samberg starring as the fictional cocaine-addicted "Bad Boy of Tennis," Aaron Williams, but there was also Kit Harington as the young and simple-minded tennis prodigy Charles Poole.

This was a surprising role for Harington at the time. In 2015 he was best known for playing the very serious Jon Snow from "Game of Thrones," someone who would stoically fight wildlings and white walkers while grieving over his tragic love life. Jon Snow was always brooding over something, which makes sense, given that by season 5 he knew he had the fate of the world on his shoulders. Harrington fans were so used to him being dead serious, they weren't expecting a role where he got to play silly.  

The main thing that distinguishes Harington's Jon Snow from Harington's Charles Poole is that the latter character is really, really dumb. Trapped in a controlling, emotionally stunting relationship with his mother, poor Poole has the mind and demeanor of a child. He doesn't understand what sex is, despite his grown age, nor does he seem to have many opinions that haven't been approved by his mother first. There are similarities between the two characters (mainly, neither Poole nor Snow ever seem to be enjoying themselves), but it's jarring to see Harrington play a character so severely lacking in intelligence.

Something else fans learned from this special: Harington's great at physical comedy. There's a sequence during the tennis match's sixth day where Poole's character is about to win the game, only for magician David Copperfield to suddenly appear on Poole's shoulders. (Copperfield explains that this was all a mix-up during a routine trick of his, and that he'd intended to land on the Statue of Liberty's shoulders.) The game continues, but now Poole can't help but constantly look up during the game, in perpetual fear that a magician might land on him all over again. 

It's an unbelievably stupid plot point for a lot of reasons (magic is real in this universe?), and it's sold perfectly through Harington's performance. Many times throughout this past decade ,the memory of Poole worriedly looking over his shoulders will pop back into my head, and it'll always makes me laugh. 

When asked about the special in 2015, Harington explained, "I love comedy and I've always wanted to do comedy. But I worked out recently that my type of comedy that I want to perform in is not prosaic, rom-com, classic kind of high school comedy. It's really farcical, stupid Andy Samberg/"Saturday Night Live" comedy. And this is very much in that vein." 

Harrington also recalled receiving the script for the special and "laughing all through reading it." Although a lot of the humor of "7 Days in Hell" comes down to the audience thinking Harrington would be above the sort of low-brow antics on display, it turns out Harington is totally down with them. 

This is why, when Harrington hosted "SNL" in 2019, fans shouldn't have been so surprised by how childish his episode was. From the sketch where Harington plays a burlesque stripper to the one where he gets a rectal exam from Leslie Jones, this was far and away the silliest episode of that whole season. The guy was seemingly up for any ridiculous idea the writers had for him, a quality shared by nearly all the best "SNL" recurring hosts. When Harrington said in 2015 that he preferred the more "farcical" styles of comedy, we know now beyond a doubt he was telling the truth.