Now a Belgian magazine seems to have put all the speculation to rest by quoting the actor in a way that makes it pretty clear his character Jon Snow is alive - or at least still a character. Snow was last seen on the show under a flash of knives being stabbed to death. Until he was spotted last week filming a battle scene. Oops. Fans who thought the collective title of George R. R. Martin's books - A Song of Ice and Fire - referred to Daenerys (Fire) and Snow (Ice), and that the series would culminate in these protagonists somehow being crucial to the endgame, were bewildered by the "death" scene and then heartened by news of the latest filming. Some never believed Snow had been killed off. Including, it seems, Harington. Whose age, we might add, is 28. "I had to pass on amazing parts because I was attached to Game of Thrones," he told Dutch-language Belgian weekly television magazine Humo during what is described as a "recent" interview in Paris promoting Testament of Youth.

"So the show is like a [double-edged] sword to me: I owe a lot to it, but at the same time it has almost completely drained me. Oh well, I try not to think about it too much. The important thing is that I now know exactly how long I am still under contract, and in the meantime— "How many more seasons would that be?" asked the Humo reporter. "Nice try," Harington laughed. "I can't talk about that." And then he sort-of does. "Let's just say that Game of Thrones will remain a part of my life for a while, I'll probably be in my 30s when it's over. One thing's for sure: the day I'm no longer on Thrones is the day I'll bury myself in movie projects." Which he's not, at the moment. But as Vanity Fair points out, it all has to be taken with a grain of salt. For a start, the interview was "recent" - which could mean anything - and Harington was definitive about Snow's fate in post-finale interviews when he said: "It's final. He's dead" and "I'm dead. I'm not coming back next season."

"There's also plenty of room for ambiguity here," the magazine reflects."Harington saying he's under contract is not the same as saying he'll appear. Nor does it guarantee that if he appears it will be as anything more than a corpse or a figure in a flashback or vision. "So if we want to take Harington 100 percent at his word here, and quite literally, then maybe it's worth noting that the Jon Snow actor will turn 30 in December 2016. Plenty of time to wrap up two more seasons of shooting." For more stories like this follow Spectrum on Facebook