From rural Worcestershire to Westeros, why the raven-haired Game of Thrones actor has Hollywood at his beck and call.

Meeting a famous person in the flesh typically requires a lightning-fast adjustment of expectation. In the case of Mr Kit Harington, the break-out star of the global TV smash Game of Thrones, this distorting effect is both reduced and, oddly, magnified. He looks exactly like Jon Snow, the hero he plays on the show – same tangled raven locks, same close-cropped beard, same pensive expression. So that’s reassuring. All the more jarring, then, that rather than Snow’s familiar fur-collared cloak, Mr Harington is wearing a summer blazer, and instead of wielding a broadsword, he’s carrying nothing more immediately threatening than a pack of Marlboros.

In other words, he is both instantly recognisable as the brooding, saturnine Snow, and apparently nothing like him whatsoever: a chatty, unassuming Englishman, 28 years old, with the entertainment world at his feet, who just happens to look uncannily like a mythical warrior of Westeros. It’s a little disorienting for me, so imagine how he feels.

“I think the moment I realised [Game of Thrones] could be a life-changer personally was going to Comic-Con for the first time,” he says. “I’d splashed out on a drop-top Mustang in LA, and I drove with my girlfriend at the time to San Diego. I got out of the car and… flashbulbs!”

I am dimly aware, of course, that outside Comic-Con there are those who come to Mr Harington with no preconceptions at all. People for whom Game of Thrones, the HBO megahit based on Mr George RR Martin’s fantasy book cycle, is just another box set they haven’t bothered to download – like The Newsroom, only with dragons. For the purposes of this article, those people need know only this. Game of Thrones is set for the most part in the aforementioned continent of Westeros. In the far north is a high wall, defending those to the south of it from the terrifying spirits on the other side. This wall is guarded by the Night’s Watch, an un-elite organisation consisting of, as one character describes them, “sullen peasants, debtors, poachers, rapers, thieves and bastards”. Jon Snow is the latter – the illegitimate son of a nobleman. His scenes are almost all played out at the wall or in the wilderness beyond it, far from the main action. Mr Harington has now completed five seasons – the fifth is showing now – and later this year, as long as his character survives (he’s not telling but I think we can make a safe bet, based on the fact he’s still wearing the hair), he’ll be back in Northern Ireland for the filming of the sixth.

Unlike other prominent cast members, who play more flamboyant figures, Mr Harington does not get to chew much CGI.

“He’s incredibly introverted,” says Mr Harington of Snow, over a companionable cup of tea in the kitchen of the house in south London where he’s been posing for MR PORTER. “It’s like if anyone in Game of Thrones didn’t want to be on the show Game of Thrones, it’d be Jon Snow. If he could see the cameras, he wouldn’t want them there. He lives in his head.”