English pretty boy Kit Harington made a name for himself as the dreamy (though often clueless) Jon Snow in HBO's hit series Game of Thrones. His next conquest is movie domination. The latest title he's added to his quick-growing filmography is the World War I drama Youth.
THR reports Harington has signed on to Youth, committing him to co-star with the lovely Alicia Vikander, the Swedish ingénue who won critical praise and international attention with her stirring turns in the sweeping biopic A Royal Affair and Joe Wright's breathtaking adaptation of Anna Karenina. BBC Films will produce with David Heyman; James Kent, who most recently helmed several episodes of the Golden Globe-nominated Starz series The White Queen, will direct.
Youth is a story of love and reliance inspired by the life of Vera Brittain. She was an English writer who lived through World War I, and went on to capture the experience in a best-selling memoir, Testament of Youth. Vikander is set to star as Brittain, while Harington will play her soldier fiancé. This will mark the pair's second collaboration; following the recently wrapped fantasy adventure Seventh Son.
Below you can read Amazon's synopsis of Brittain's Testament of Youth, and get some sense of the book's significance:
Much of what we know and feel about the First World War we owe to Vera Brittain’s elegiac yet unsparing book, which set a standard for memoirists from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman. Abandoning her studies at Oxford in 1915 to enlist as a nurse in the armed services, Brittain served in London, in Malta, and on the Western Front. By war’s end she had lost virtually everyone she loved. Testament of Youth is both a record of what she lived through and an elegy for a vanished generation. Hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as a book that helped "both form and define the mood of its time," it speaks to any generation that has been irrevocably changed by war."
There's no word yet on when Youth might shoot. But Harington's got plenty coming up in the meantime. Of course there's the hotly anticipated return of Game of Thrones on April 6th. But before that he'll take to the big screen in the disaster movie/period piece Pompeii, which opens on February 21st.
Around the time of Pompeii's release, Harington will begin production on Spooks, an espionage thriller based on the BBC series (also known as MI-5). That film will be fronted by Peter Firth and Jennifer Ehle. Then the summer brings Harington's first animated role in How to Train Your Dragon 2 on June 13th. Lastly, Seventh Son is set to hit theaters on February 6th, 2015.
