Though famous for his role as Jon Snow in “Game of Thrones”, the film industry has been trying to make a leading man out of Kit Harington for a while. So far though, the actor’s film choices have not gone great.
Two big budget launches – “Pompeii” and “Seventh Son,” fizzled on arrival. Smaller budgeted “Silent Hill: Revelation” and “Spooks: The Greater Good” were dud sequel follow-ups to much more superior earlier incarnations. On the arthouse front “Testament of Youth” was a critical success, but both “Brimstone” and “The Death & Life of John F. Donovan” came and went with little fanfare.
They’ll try again with Marvel’s “Eternals” next year, but in the meantime a story has emerged of one time Harington came close but missed out – the film that would eventually become Guy Ritchie’s “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”.
David Dobkin, who helmed this weekend’s just launched “EuroVision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga,” spoke with Collider recently and explained that Harington almost played the role of King Arthur in the film which planned to be the first in a multi-film saga very different to what we ended up with:
“When he read for King Arthur, the way he does it by the time you understand who he is in that he’s honorable, his character works against him sometimes ’cause he’s so pure of heart. He carries you through Game of Thrones in such an amazing way to the end, and that is exactly what we needed for that character for the way that I wrote the script. He was supposed to be an everyman King Arthur, not someone who pulls it and goes, ‘I won the lottery,’ but someone who pulls it and goes, ‘I’m not even equipped to do this.’ The minute he pulls the sword, the entire kingdom is trying to kill him. To me, that was what was cool.”
Inspired heavily by Christopher Nolan’s reimagining of the “Batman” franchise, the project has the likes of Joel Kinnaman for Sir Lancelot, Gary Oldman for Merlin, Marion Cotillard possibly for Morgana and Liam Neeson possibly for Galahad:
“When I sold the film to Warner Bros., there was no cast contingency. After I showed the screen tests of Joel and Kit together, we got greenlit, and a day later, the international department who saw the screen test kind of came in and were like, ‘We don’t think we can sell the movie with these two guys.’ And the pressure got harder and harder, we had already scouted Hungary. We were greenlit and on our way to making the movie. I had a DP, Philippe Rousselot was shooting the movie. There was a production designer. Everything was up and running, and then international Warner Bros. put the brakes on the movie, and they told me we had to recast.”
Before Dobkin could get started on recasting, he received the script for “The Judge” and started work on that film instead. Guy Ritchie was brought on board to put his take on the project with Charlie Hunnam ultimately coming onboard as Arthur.
