Season 5 of Game of Thrones concluded on such a crazy note that fans had no shortage of topics to talk about for the next ten months. The finale ended with everyone's favorite broody Northern bastard bleeding to death courtesy of a Julius Caesar-esque assassination plot. The show clearly wanted everybody to think that Jon Snow was dead, but a lot of us just couldn't conceive of Thrones really continuing into Season 6 without him. According to actor Kit Harington, folks on the cast and crew had even more reason to doubt the big death. Harington shared this story about what happened when he tried to say goodbye to the cast and crew after Season 5:
It wasn't one of my proudest moments as an actor, either. I wasn't convincing at all. I didn't want to do a big speech and start crying, because I knew I'd be seeing these people next year. So I did a bit of a hash job on it, and I could tell a lot of them didn't buy it.
Kit Harington told the tale of his failed farewell in a talk with The Wrap, and it's a fun story of bad acting from a man who is currently nominated to take the Best Supporting Actor prize at the 2016 Emmys. Given that Harington had to deliver his parting speech before he began his months of declarations about Jon Snow being totally, 100%, eternally dead, this may have been the first time that he had to try and sell his departure from Game of Thrones. I personally can't blame him for falling short on breaking down in tears. Between knowing that I'd be back in less than a year and not necessarily wanting to lie to all of my co-workers, I probably wouldn't be convincing anybody either.
At least one of his fellow actors believed him. Sophie Turner, who plays Sansa, was so convinced that Kit Harington was gone from Thrones forever that she wrote a long letter to him all about how much she cherished their time together. She hadn't even worked with him since their characters were split apart back in Season 1; she had to really believe that Jon was dead for good to make such an outpouring of love happen. She must have had quite a surprise when she got her scripts for Season 6 and discovered that she'd be sharing a lot of screentime with him.
Even those who didn't buy his goodbye might not have known just how Jon would come back. Kit Harington himself spent a while hoping that Jon would be resurrected as a darker version of himself, and he has admitted initial disappointment that Jon Snow 2.0 wasn't a villain. Still, there were noticeable changes in Jon, even if they weren't the result of death turning him into a bad guy. Jon went on a journey that took him from corpse to general to king, and it was a journey that earned Harington the Emmy nom. He may not have been proud of himself as an actor after Season 5, but he should definitely be proud after his work in Season 6.
Check out our breakdown of what we know so far about Game of Thrones Season 7, and don't forget to take a look at our fall TV premiere schedule to see what you can watch during the wait for more of Jon Snow and Co. in Westeros.
