See Kit Harington's GQ photo shoot

The cast of Game of Thrones as they appeared in GQ

Video: The GQ Style Survey with Kit Harington

The world of Game of Thrones—absurd, fantastical but also disturbingly familiar—is one in which treachery, debauchery, and every kind of nastiness seem to thrive. "People are constantly shocked," Kit Harington notes, almost apologetically, "that the characters who are trying to do good get killed off." Somehow the responsibility of portraying an antidote to all this despair and degradation—in the guise of the innocent-eyed, endlessly baffled but somehow nobly heroic Jon Snow—has fallen on the shoulders of this 27-year-old Brit with barely any acting experience at all before now. It is a duty he takes seriously. "I think Jon Snow is one of the last bastions of a young hero who might do a good thing," he says. "There’s a huge amount riding on him to be a leader, and I want him to become that leader. I guess for me, Jon Snow is a figure of hope within the whole thing—that he’ll continue to be this good person, and somehow the story will end well for everybody."

Harington is still a little surprised by the trajectory that catapulted him here after one job on the London stage. He had been conditioned to expect less: "I didn’t really think I’d be a leading man in any respect whatsoever. At drama school in my third year I was resigned to the fate of being Young Male Rape Victim No. 2. That was the kind of category I was put in. I’ve got a very baby face underneath all of this fuzz."

In fact, it was that very baby face that helped him get this role. At the beginning of the George R.R. Martin fantasy-book cycle on which the show is based, Jon Snow and many of the related characters are aged around 14, and that’s how the actors were asked to play it in the pilot. As a man in his early twenties who could pass as a teenager, Harington was perfect. But it didn’t work: "They were, It’s way too clean-cut—we want you to grow your hair and grow your beard.’ " He had never even tried to grow a beard before; he wasn’t actually sure that he could. As it turned out, the result was a winning one, both in terms of fitting into the Game of Thrones universe and causing quite a stir in our own world. Now he’s contracted to keep this look as long as he is on the show, which shoots through the second half of every year. Whatever other acting he does in the first half of the year, he has to arrive on the set in July looking like Jon Snow. "It does keep you restricted," he points out. "I can’t go off and play a U.S. Marine."

An uncomfortable amount of the attention Harington has received has centered around the way he now looks, and his hair in particular. Early on in the show’s success, Harington tried to deflect an interview question about what specifically he does to play his character ("I hate talking about that," he explains to me) by offering, as a dismissive quip, "I just don’t wash my hair." For a while this became the most famous fact about him. Frustrating, but it is nonetheless, Harington acknowledges, "kind of true." For as long as they’re shooting in one location—six weeks, maybe—Harington forsakes shampoo. "I like it to look greasy and medieval," he reasons, "so it gets very tangled." He’d rather not have "flowing locks," and he does his best. "By the end it’s pretty horrible."