The mystical land of Westeros is often described as a place where summers can last for decades and winters can span entire lifetimes. Most things don’t change in Westeros as often or as rapidly as they do in the real world, including fashion. Last year, before Season 5 of Game of Thrones kicked off, Maisie Williams’ new Arya Stark costume made headlines, as it was the first time she had worn a different outfit since the first season. Fans will get to see one beloved character get a new look this season, that will surely turn some heads. Be warned, if you didn’t watch last week’s Game of Thrones episode Home, there will be huge SPOILERS below.
Sunday night’s episode Home gave fans the moment they’ve been waiting all year for, the resurrection of Jon Snow (Kit Harington). Ever since his death in the Season 5 finale Mother’s Mercy, a prevalent theory was that the red priestess Melisandre (Carice Van Houten) could bring Snow back from the dead, which is exactly what she did at the end of Home. Ever since the Season 5 finale, rumors had spread about whether or not Jon Snow was dead or not. One of the indications that the actor was actually dead, and not returning to the series, was that he cut his hair last summer, after the finale aired. As it turns out, his shorter hair was all part of the year-long ruse Kit Harington played on us all, as he revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“I wanted to sell [the story that he was leaving the series] a bit more. I know this hairstyle this hair cut is very synonymous with the show. I know in the past I’d said I’d cut it off when I can. I wanted to appear with shorter hair straight away so it would sell the lie. We cut it much shorter for this season, and do a different hairstyle this season and put it up in a bun.”
While Season 6 was in production, some news outlets even began running “hair watch” stories, trying to determine whether his hair length was any sort of indication about his fate on the show. When production on Season 6 started last summer, the producers decided to give him a shorter haircut, and the actor even had to wear hair extensions during his resurrection scene, to match his hair length from Season 5. The extensions are what Melisandre was cutting away during Home’s pivotal scene. Fans got to see Kit Harington‘s hair in a bun in set photos that surfaced last summer, but most fans didn’t even notice his hair was shorter.
“Nobody’s noticed I’ve had short hair. We’ve chopped most of it off, and people were like, ‘Oh look, he’s still got long hair.’ So that didn’t work as well.”
Shortly after Jon Snow came back to life, Kit Harington teased that Season 6 would be the biggest yet for Jon Snow, which continues with the new episode Oathbreaker, airing Sunday, May 8 at 9 PM ET on HBO. The preview released for this episode teased that some now think he’s a God, after rising from the dead, but we don’t know how Snow plans to deal with the treacherous Aliser Thorne (Owen Teale), who orchestrated his cold-blooded murder and is now rotting in a Castle Black jail cell. Stay tuned for more on Game of Thrones as we get closer to this new episode.