Kit Harington's HBO Sports Spoof Is A Must-Watch For Industry And Game Of Thrones Fans

Odds are high that you've seen Kit Harington on "Game of Thrones," the show that made him famous as George R.R. Martin's conflicted, fur-swathed hero Jon Snow. Odds are not high, unfortunately, that you've seen Harington in his funniest and weirdest project as of this writing: the HBO sports spoof "7 Days in Hell."

For reasons I'll never fully understand, Harington's turn in "7 Days in Hell" flew largely under the radar, even though this brief, ridiculous, and outright hilarious movie was made while Harington was starring on "Game of Thrones." (In 2015, to be precise.) This short little mockumentary, directed by Jake Szymanski ("Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates," "Jury Duty") and written by Murray Miller ("King of the Hill," "Girls"), is actually based on a real tennis match ... which is sort of hard to believe if you've seen this movie. Still, it's true: The idea for "7 Days in Hell" is directly inspired by a legendary tennis showdown between American player John Isner and French player Nicolas Mahut in 2010, which lasted for 11 hours and five minutes. As you might have guessed from the title alone, "7 Days in Hell" showcases a tennis match that lasts a week, if that makes this mockumentary's absurd heightening quite clear.

In 2015, Harington's co-lead Andy Samberg spoke to Grantland about the film and how it came about. As he recalled, he and Miller were kicking around ideas and came up with something. "When the Isner-Mahut match happened a few years back, we were joking about how our movie should be about a match that never ends at Wimbledon, because they have that rule, you know, that you have to win by two," Samberg explained. "So, theoretically a match there could go for eternity." That is almost precisely what happens.

So, who does Kit Harington play in "7 Days in Hell?" That would be the clownish British tennis pro Charles Poole, who's quite a departure from Harington's "Game of Thrones" character Jon Snow. Charles, controlled by his openly twisted bully of a mother Louisa (a brilliant Mary Steenburgen), is a total buffoon, and that's me being polite; he never seems to follow the thread of conversation, spends time in interviews painstakingly explaining the rules of tennis to experienced sports reporters like Soledad O'Brien (playing herself), and overuses the word "indubitably" while never, ever using it correctly. (Charles's apparently fragile and likely very smooth brain tends to break down under too much pressure — in one of the film's funniest shots, the "camera crew" catches Charles standing in the corner of his hotel room staring at the wall like something out of "The Blair Witch Project.")

The central tennis match in the movie takes place between Charles and Aaron Williams, a hotshot American player known as the "bad boy" of tennis played by Andy Samberg. Adorned in a truly bizarre spiky white-blonde wig and some of the shortest tennis shorts you'll ever see in your entire life, Aaron is a whirling dervish of chaos who keeps waylaying the match by doing stuff like engaging in sexual encounters with streakers or bragging about sleeping with Charles's supermodel ex Lily Allsworth (Karen Gillan). Every single aspect of this movie is genuinely so, so funny, from tennis pros like Serena Williams and John McEnroe playing themselves in talking head segments to the increasingly absurd ways that the match between Charles and Aaron continues ... and without spoiling the ending, there's a reason it's only 45 minutes.

Kit Harington never got to be funny at all on "Game of Thrones," which is a real shame — he proved he can be incredibly funny in "7 Days in Hell," and now, he's showing off his considerable range as a performer in another HBO project, "Industry." The series about toxic, hard-partying finance bros and bro-ettes introduced Harington in the show's third season as Sir Henry Muck, the CEO of an environmental tech start-up who starts working with the show's central characters at the London finance firm Pierpoint. In the series' fourth season, however, Harington's Henry gets a serious upgrade in terms of importance — because he's married to one of the show's leads, Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela).

Henry and Yasmin's marriage is borne more out of convenience than anything else (both of them come from exorbitantly wealthy families who have endured some sort of public relations nightmare, and both of them are trying to restyle their images as a result), but it's a boon for fans of "Industry," because now we get to watch a whole bunch of explosive scenes between Harington and Abela. Harington, who took time away from acting after "Game of Thrones" concluded, is in incredibly fine form as he spars on-screen with Abela and inhabits Henry, a chronically depressed overgrown toddler with too much money and not enough direction in life who tries to numb his increasing pain with drugs and alcohol. Sure, Harington's role in "7 Days in Hell" is a hell of a lot sillier, but in many ways, Charles Poole stumbled through his tennis match so that Henry Muck could go wild on "Industry" — and it's great to watch this talented actor spread his wings.