We weren’t supposed to know about it, but someone leaked the existence of a Game Of Thrones spin-off over the summer that will focus on Jon Snow, with George R.R. Martin explaining later on that the whole pitch for the spin-off actually came from Jon Snow actor Kit Harington himself—with him bringing in his own people and making his own pitch to HBO, rather than just sitting back and waiting for someone else to say “hey, what if we took the ostensible ‘protagonist’ from one of the biggest TV shows ever and gave him his own show?”
Nobody else has leaked anything about it since then, but Harington did vaguely dance around the idea of continuing Jon Snow’s story at the official Game Of Thrones Convention this weekend, telling the fans in attendance how he felt about where the end of the show left his character. “I think if you asked him, he would’ve felt he got off lightly,” Harington said, referring to Jon being exiled back to The Wall as punishment for killing Daenerys after she went on that dragon rampage, with him adding, “At the end of the show when we find him in that cell, he’s preparing to be beheaded and he wants to be. He’s done. The fact he goes to the Wall is the greatest gift and also the greatest curse.”
The way Harington sees it, it’s good that Jon Snow got to live, but it’s also bad that he has to live forever in the place where he experienced most of the bad stuff that happened to him over the course of the series—Harington specifically mentions the death of Ygritte and when he had to hang Olly for betraying him, but let’s not forget that The Wall is also where he met Westeros’ best best friend, Samwell Tarly, so it wasn’t all bad. Still, Harington says that the end of the show left Jon to “live out his life thinking about all of this trauma, and that… that’s interesting.” That comes from Entertainment Weekly, which says he “coyly emphasized” that last part.
So that means that, if this Jon Snow show goes forward, it will probably be about everyone’s favorite sullen bastard being… a sullen bastard. Hey, if it ain’t broke. It’s not like a Tyrion spin-off wouldn’t be about him being a drunk smart-ass, or that a Samwell spin-off wouldn’t be about him quietly being the smartest person in the room who nobody appreciates as much as they should.