From the very first moment that Jon Snow met Ygritte on Game of Thrones, sparks started to fly, and apparently, things went pretty much the same for the actors who played them in real life, Kit Harington and Rose Leslie.
However, just like their fictional counterparts, they had their ups and downs as a couple.
Jon captured Ygritte, Ygritte captured Jon, she made fun of him a lot, they fell in love, they had some fun in a cave, they fought against each other, and he held her in his arms as she took her last breath.
Kit met Rose, they dated, they broke up, they started dating again on the sly, they tried everything they could to keep it out of the press, they gave up and told everyone that they were a couple, she moved in with him, they bought a new place together, they got engaged, and at some unspecified date that will likely be very soon, they're getting married.
Also, just like Jon and Ygritte, they keep people talking about them. Harington and Leslie are now completely open about their relationship, and as they make the rounds of talk shows and magazines, we get to find out little tidbits about their life together.
So even if Jon Snow is romantically involved with Daenerys Targaryen these days, Kit Harington and Rose Leslie are rock solid. They're also a lot of fun, apparently.
With that said, here are the 17 Secrets About Kit Harington And Rose Leslie's Relationship.
He lied to the press about their relationship... repeatedly
Initially, the couple really did try to hide their relationship, even from their GoT co-workers. "We failed miserably," Leslie said. "We wouldn’t flirt in front of other people [and] we thought that nobody knew, but they did. And it doesn’t matter; it’s fine."
Early on, when asked about their onscreen chemistry, Harington told a red carpet reporter, "We really get on as friends, and we hit it off very quickly when we first met, and I think that reflects on screen, or I hope it does ... it's lovely to have someone that you genuinely count as a friend working opposite."
In May 2014, he was asked by the Evening Standard if they were an item, and said, "All rumour and myth. Me and Rose [Leslie] are very, very close and very good friends. And continue to be, actually. She’s wonderful. But no, no love affair."
However, they were already dating at the time.
In 2015, he was profiled in GQ, and the interviewer wrote, "Harington usually refuses to confirm the relationship, and sometimes rubbishes it."
"I spoke to one journalist who was still sore about putting his absolute denial into print, the same day Harington and Leslie were spotted out, necking," the reporter stated.
In that same interview, Harington said, "I'll never talk about any particular relationship I've been in. But I will say I'm single at the moment." However, he clearly wasn't.
They are distantly related to each other
Unlike their fictional characters, Kit Harington and Rose Leslie both come from some pretty prestigious backgrounds. (Okay, Jon Snow probably does too, but we're not there yet.)
Kit was born Christopher Catesby Harington, and didn't find out that his name was Christopher and not Kit until he was 11 years old.
"I went to school, and I remember that you had to do these tests to find out what set you’re in— how clever you are. I put down 'Kit Harington' and they looked at me like I was completely stupid, and they said, 'No, you’re Christopher Harington, I’m afraid,'" he said.
"It was only then I learnt my actual name. That was kind of a bizarre existential crisis for an 11-year-old to have, but in the end I always stuck with Kit, because I felt that’s who I was,” stated Harington.
Thanks to his paternal grandmother, Lavender Cecilia Denny, Harington is a direct descendant of King Charles II.
Guess who else is? Rose Leslie. While her father has the fancy title-- he's the chieftain of Aberdeenshire clan Leslie-- it's her mother who connects her to the same royalty as her fiancé.
Candida Mary Sibyl "Candy" Leslie (née Weld) of Clan Fraser, and her maternal great-grandfather was, much like Lavender Cecilia Denny, a direct descendant of King Charles II.
(Also, another of Harington's ancestors invented the first flushing toilet for Queen Elizabeth I.)
Their very first intimate scene was with each other
It turns out that both of these Game of Thrones actors had never done a love scene until the romantic (and explicit) one they filmed together in the cave in season three.
“It was my first [adult] scene that I’ve ever done and it was weird,” Leslie told People magazine.
Meanwhile, Harington told Vulture, "I've never done a love scene before, and especially a [clothless] scene, so it's very strange being [without clothing] in front of a hundred or so people."
Leslie admitted that it was "terrifying."
“It was my first-ever scene like that," she added. “A closed set for taking your top off would normally mean there would be about four men. That’s what would happen in any other TV production. But in the grand machine that is Game Of Thrones, it’s not like that. I was [not wearing clothes] in a cave with about 30 men watching!”
She got some help from her wardrobe team, though. "The wardrobe ladies on set were wonderful and would rush over with a dressing gown as soon as we cut."
They were both happy with the results. “It’s a very beautiful scene and [nice things] don’t happen very often on the show," Leslie told Entertainment Weekly. "It’s just two people falling in love. It’s very beautiful.”
They fell in love in Iceland watching the Northern Lights
Talk about a love story. It's one thing to fall in love with a co-worker, but it's quite another when your job involves snuggling with your new loved one in the cold in a beautiful country watching one of the world's most spectacular natural phenomena.
When Vogue Italia asked Kit Harington what his favorite memory was of shooting Game of Thrones for their cover story on him in May 2016, he said, "The three weeks in Iceland when we were shooting the second season. Because the country is beautiful, because the Northern Lights are magical, and because it was there that I fell in love."
"If you’re already attracted to someone, and then they play your love interest in the show, it’s becomes very easy to fall in love," he added.
He also told talk show host Jonathan Ross, "Have you been to Iceland before? It's a fantastic place. I fell in love in Iceland."
"Who did you fall in love with?" Ross asked him. Harington was ready to spill it. "I fell in love with my co-star."
Ross named Rose Leslie, and mentioned that she'd already been a guest on his show. "She's just the loveliest girl and she could do so much better," he joked.
They don't celebrate the same holidays
Those are Seth Meyers' hands holding up a photo of a surprise that Harington staged for Leslie in their refrigerator.
Leslie told Meyers that she'd been away for about six months, working on The Good Fight in New York, "and then I go home and this [jerk] puts this in the fridge." Even better was the fact that he was filming her as she discovered it, while she thought he was just texting someone.
The backstory, she said, was that there was "this whole big thing with the Brita filter" and she opened the fridge to see "this terrifying head staring back at me."
"And look, he went to town," she added, noticing the care he put into the platter and accessories.
It turns out that while Harington grew up in a family that loved a good April Fool's Day prank, Leslie's family didn't celebrate the day at all.
"Her family doesn't do April Fool's," Harington told Jonathan Ross, in this clip where you can see the footage of her gruesome discovery.
"After that, she was in tears, and I was there going, 'April Fool's.' It didn't go down well," he stated. (He also pointed out that she saved the Brita filter.)
He continued: "She pretty much told me if I did it ever again, that that would be it, and I think that's marriage included."
She made him dress up like Jon Snow for a party... and he hated every minute
So maybe Rose Leslie doesn't enjoy an April Fool's prank, but no one can claim that she doesn't have a sense of humor.
Leslie and Harington were set to attend a friend's 30th birthday party together, and it a costume party with the theme of "bad taste."
They headed to a costume shop together, and the woman working there didn't quite recognize him. Harington said she told him, "You know, you really look like the guy from Game of Thrones, and I’ve got a Game of Thrones outfit." Yes -- it was a Jon Snow costume.
Leslie loved the idea. "I won't love you if you don't wear it," she whispered in his ear. "You should do it."
Given the party's theme, it sounds like the perfect choice, but the other party guests didn't get the joke.
"It was really embarrassing," Harington said. "The people bringing around canapes were looking at me, thinking. 'You're sad man! You've come to a party dressed as your character.'"
Just to make things a little bit worse, Harington thinks that the woman at the costume shop eventually figured out that he was more than just a Jon Snow lookalike.
"I think the woman in the shop realized who I was as I was leaving," he stated. "But that’s even sadder: me going to a fancy dress shop and buying a Jon Snow costume."
Nicole Kidman pressured him to get married before he was ready
Poor Kit Harington.
In June of 2017, he was a guest on The Late Late Show with James Corden (when they were filming in London), along with Oscar-winning movie star Nicole Kidman.
He was telling a lovely story about how he was living with his best friend and writing partner, Dan West, and they had a Gwyneth Paltrow-style "conscious uncoupling" and each moved in with their girlfriends.
He described what it was like when Rose Leslie moved in with him, and told a cute story about how he told her to make the place hers, and her first decision was to move the kitchen to another floor.
It was then that Kidman got involved. "Are you going to get married, or...?" she asked him. He got nervous, and "Oh, wow" was all he could muster up as a response.
She wasn't done. "I just think it's kind of nice if you're going to live together to maybe get engaged," she said.
"I've been put on the spot by Nicole Kidman," Harington pointed out.
"I'm just all about, hey what about getting engaged and then living together?" she responded, then laughed when James Corden asked her, "Oh, are you? You're not one for pre-marital ... wow."
He wasn't a fan of the first big show she was on
Rose Leslie had a decent résumé before Game of Thrones, and the biggest show on it was Downton Abbey.
She played Gwen Dawson, a housemaid who dreamed of leaving "the service" and becoming a secretary. She shared a room with lady's maid Anna, and got close with one of the daughters of the house, Sybil, who encouraged her to pursue her dream and eventually helped her get her first secretarial job.
It was her performance on the show that got her the gig on Game of Thrones.
Despite the fact that Downton was a huge hit, it wasn't on Kit Harington's must-see list of shows.
In May of 2014-- after they'd started seeing each other-- he told Rolling Stone that he thought that America had an unhealthy obsession with royalty and the class system.
Admitting that he hadn't seen a whole of of episodes of the show, he said "I really disagree with Downton Abbey on lots of f***ing levels. It celebrates the class system, and its kind of overall message seems to be, 'Wasn't it good when everybody knew their place within society?'"
He continued: "Why should we hark back to those times? It was bulls**t. We got out of that, and thank the f**k we did."
They are sweetly traditional
While Nicole Kidman may think that Kit Harington and Rose Leslie aren't traditional enough, they do have their sweet old-fashioned moments as a couple.
Yes, they dodged press rumors of their relationship, and yes, they moved in together first, but when they got engaged, they let the world know in a tried and true and very traditional way: they took out an ad in the "forthcoming marriages" section of the newspaper.
They chose their hometown paper, The Times, to make things public and official, even going so far as to include their parents.
“The engagement is announced between Kit, younger son of David and Deborah Harington of Worcestershire, and Rose, middle daughter of Sebastian and Candy Leslie of Aberdeenshire" was the full text.
Four months later, when asked by Town & Country how the wedding planning was going, Leslie blamed her incredibly busy acting schedule for not having done anything about it yet.
"I'm trying to fit in my wedding," she told them after outlining her various upcoming acting jobs. When she was asked about dates, locations, and registry items, she confessed, “I haven’t tackled it. There’s just too much to do.”
It makes one wonder if all of the magazines were asking Harington the same question. Fair's fair.
Their wedding is going to be very Game of Thrones-friendly...
We suppose they could have sent ravens, but instead, Rose Leslie and Kit Harington used snail mail to send out their wedding invitations, and chose the perfect postage: Jon Snow stamps.
The stamp was part of a limited edition Game of Thrones collection from the British Royal Mail that became available earlier this year. It consisted of 15 different images from the show-- 10 human characters and five creatures. The invitations went out to about 200 people.
While some details are scarce, the wedding itself will be just as grand (but not as deadly) as a GoT wedding, as it's taking place at a castle in Aberdeen, Scotland, most likely the one Leslie grew up in called Lickleyhead Castle.
Her family lived there for over 800 years, and these days it is often rented out for weddings and big events.
Leslie has described the castle as cold and very drafty, but it's a 50-acre estate and appears to be a great setting for a grand wedding.
Beyond the stamps, should the guests expect to see Game of Thrones costumes at the ceremony itself? Harington says, “No. There is absolutely no chance of me convincing [Rose] of that.”
Of course, he also claimed they weren't dating when they were, so who knows?
But it is not going to be friendly to Game of Thrones production
Clear the battlefield. Obviously Harington and Leslie have a lot of friends in the Game of Thrones cast and on the production team, and if they want everyone at their wedding, something's gotta give.
The show is currently filming its eighth and final season, and is scheduled to continue through August, but the happy couple plans to get married much sooner than that.
Last year on The Jonathan Ross Show, Harington told Ross that he made his intentions clear to the GoT producer in charge of scheduling.
“I rang him up and I said, ‘I’m getting married and it’s your fault actually ... You need to factor in a Game of Thrones wedding by the way.’ They [the cast] have all got to be there so the whole thing has got to shut down,” Harginton said.
He asked them to shut down for a full day so everyone can attend, but they may need more than that depending on the shooting locations for the show's final season.
This is also why they haven't talked about the actual date to the press. They know that fans of the show would love to see the entire cast gathered together and dressed in their finest, and they don't want any wedding crashers showing up to stargaze.
They both have phobias, but not the same ones
Harington definitely has Leslie beat in the phobias department. For one, he's claustrophobic, which made shooting the "Battle of the Bastards" sequence particularly unpleasant.
"I'm mortally afraid of crowds. I panic," he said. "It was one of the most terrifying things and most uncomfortable -- 15 bearded Irishmen crushing you."
Harington also admitted to being afraid of flying on planes and stated that he has to touch the outside of the plane three times before going in. His other fears include spiders, certain video games (like Doom and Silent Hill), and "syringes and injections." He says he passes out regularly when he gets them.
He also has some weird superstitions. He told Jimmy Fallon that when he sees an ambulance go by, he scratches his nether regions because it's good luck for the person inside. Despite Fallon's disbelief, this is a real Italian superstition.
Leslie is also afraid of spiders, but has a very specific phobia that Harington doesn't share: velvet.
While she was interviewed by The Telegraph, she shuddered when her interviewer touched the giant velvet cushion on the couch of Leslie's agent's office. She insisted that it was fine, but admitted, “It’s just the touch of it I don’t like. The sound it makes.” When the pillow was placed on the floor, she visibly relaxed.
Presumably she's afraid of severed heads in the refrigerator as well.
He's not allowed to read Game of Thrones scripts in front of her
Ygritte came to her end (sorry, spoiler, but it's four-year-old news) in season four, but Jon Snow still carries on, and these days Rose Leslie is still a huge fan of the show.
While Harington has used spoilers to his advantage in the past, once even spilling the secret about Jon Snow's fate to a police officer to avoid getting a speeding ticket, now that the show is in its final season, Leslie does not want to know what's coming.
She told Seth Meyers that when new scripts started coming in on his iPad, she forbade Harington from reading them in front of her.
"I can read his facial expression. I don't want to know anything that's going on within his eyes, or anything like that, so I send him packing. I kind of like boot him out, so … he can go to the coffee shop," Leslie said.
Meyers found this hilarious and asked again if she'd let him read scripts in front of her. “No," she said, "because I'll be able to gauge … like if he stiffens I know that someone's [life has ended]. And then my mind goes off."
At that point, Meyers had to tell her that very likely, since it's Game of Thrones, some people are going to lose their lives.
He sang to her, for a very good cause
You can only see the back of her head, but you can't mistake the look in his eyes: he was singing to a room full of people, but Kit Harington was singing directly to his lady love, Rose Leslie.
Red Nose Day is a fundraising event that takes place every other year. It is dedicated to ending child poverty.
In 2015, several members of the Game of Thrones cast teamed up with Coldplay to create Game of Thrones: The Musical. It was narrated by Liam Neeson, and six minutes of it aired on NBC. (You can see the full 12-minute version on YouTube.)
Various cast members participated, and the singers for the musical part included Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), Emilia Clark (Daenerys Targaryen), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister), Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton), Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy) and Charlotte Hope (Myranda), along with Harington.
His song was a spoof of the The Troggs' "Wild Thing" called "Wildling", and was dedicated to Jon Snow's relationship with Ygritte.
The lyrics went: "Wildling. You make my heart sing. You pull your bow string... And shoot me. Wildling."
"Wildling, I think I love you. But I wanna know for sure," he sang. " I want to take you into that cave and kiss you... down there. 'Cause I've never done it before! Yeah!"
His plans for proposing went somewhat awry
Harington had some romantic plans for proposing. "I did have some plans to do it, I was going to string up some lights in some trees and do all the romantic stuff," he told Jonathan Ross.
However, things didn't turn out that way.
“We were in the country," he continued, "and we were under this beautiful night sky, and had a log fire burning and red wine and I blew my load early.” Oops. “Sorry that’s a really bad expression ... what I meant to say was, I popped my question a bit early,” Harington explained.
Leslie described the proposal to TV Week magazine herself. “For Thanksgiving we happen to be going to Iceland, which is obviously a country we have many memories from and we both independently love,” she revealed. “I felt sure that was when it was going to be. I was confident to the max.”
However, then one day, well before the trip, he dropped to one knee and popped the question.
“We happened to be in the English countryside, which is kind of an area that I don't know that well," said Leslie. "It was at night time under a beautiful blanket of stars … The man did well. It was highly romantic.”
They've both been pranked by Game of Thrones showrunners
Showrunners' David Benioff and D.B Weiss got tired of Harington sending obscene messages from their cell phones, so they got even.
They sent him pages from a fake script, and within its pages was this description: “when the fire is finally out, we see by torchlight that all of Jon’s hair has burnt down to the scalp. The skin on the top half of his face has been melted in the extreme heat, blistered and pustulant. Despite what must be the extreme agony of permanent disfigurement, Jon stands stoically by his master’s side.”
Harington didn't find out it was fake until he was on set.
Rose Leslie also got tricked by Benioff and Weiss. When they found out that she was terrified of singing, they took advantage of the fact that the original books by George R. R. Martin include a song sung by Ygritte called "The Last of the Giants".
The song has 20 lines in it and includes lyrics like “Oooooooh, I am the last of the giants, so learn well the words of my song, or when I am gone the singing will fade, and the silence shall last long and long.”
So, of course, they sent her a fake script that required her to sing the entire thing.
He doesn't want to work with her onscreen again
They had absolutely perfect onscreen chemistry, but don't expect it to be recreated. Harington said that he he doesn't think he'd be able to be serious with her in a dramatic scene in the future.
"I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face," he said. "Honestly, I was watching Sliding Doors with her the other day, and there's a bit at the end where John Hannah is pouring his heart out to Gwyneth Paltrow and she's lying [there]. I turned to Rose and I said, 'I wouldn't be able to do that with you, because you would piss yourself.'"
He then admitted another, deeper, reason. "She's a brilliant actor ... actually I don't want to work with her because she would just show me up again. That's why," Harington admited.
Their final scene together on Game of Thrones was about her character's final moments, which were spent in his arms.
Leslie stated that they didn't rehearse it ahead of time in to keep it as organic as possible.
"If I had taken time to think about it too much then I think I would have been way too emotional before the scene had even started," she said. "I think that was the best way to approach it, and I’m glad he agreed.
The eighth and final season of Game of Thrones was announced in July 2016 and is scheduled to air on HBO sometime in 2019.
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Can you think of any other secrets about Kit Harington and Rose Leslie's relationship? Sound off in the comments!