Why Kit Harington joined Harry Potter as Lockhart amid backlash, explained
Kit Harington knows nothing, except apparently every word of the Harry Potter audiobooks, which he confessed to using as a nightly sleep aid on national television this week.
That's the short version of why the Game of Thrones star said yes to playing Gilderoy Lockhart in season two of HBO's Harry Potter series — a show that arrives with more discourse attached than any production since, well, the last thing J.K. Rowling was involved in.
How we got here (it was a mess)
The Lockhart chair has been musical. Nicholas Hoult was announced for the role on August 11; two weeks later he was out over scheduling, and Harington was in. Except Harington wasn't exactly a stranger to the part — he already voices Lockhart in Audible's full-cast Chamber of Secrets, released last December, and called the character a longtime favorite when the casting news dropped: "he's one of my favorite characters... a real dream." Kenneth Branagh's fraud-with-great-hair energy from 2002 has a lot to live up to.
His actual explanation
Asked point-blank on TODAY why he'd join the show despite the pushback, Harington went full book nerd:
"I listen to it every single night, and it helps me go to sleep."
He said he was a fan as a kid, rediscovered the books as an adult, and thinks the series format is the first chance to adapt them at full length rather than movie-shaped chunks. The nightly-listening detail is the part I can't get over — this man survived the Battle of the Bastards and winds down to Quidditch commentary.
The part he didn't touch
What Harington did not do is engage with the actual source of the backlash: Rowling's views on trans people, which have shadowed every casting announcement this show has made and pulled cast members like John Lithgow into the crossfire before a single episode has aired. Harington kept it strictly to fandom and craft.
For the record-keepers: season one, based on Sorcerer's Stone, premieres Christmas Day. Lockhart arrives with the Chamber of Secrets season after that — presumably with a full set of self-portraits and zero functional spells.
Previously we wrote: The Gilded Age returns November 1 and the richest man in America joins the Russells' world
