With this summer flurry of Emmy-friendly Tiddlebanging, some have forgotten that some really cool people were also nominated for Emmys. Kit Harington got his first-ever Emmy nomination for his work in Game of Thrones, which no one seemed mad about. Kit’s acting has been hit-or-miss in previous seasons, but this season, he was EN FUEGO as winter arrived. Producers and Kit decided to submit the “Battle of the Bastards” episode for Emmy consideration, and that’s what brought him the nomination. It’s pretty great, because that was easily Kit’s best episode. Luckily, Kit hasn’t been oversaturating the media with Kit Harington Says Words. So I actually enjoyed this new interview with Kit in The Hollywood Reporter. Some highlights:

How he approached Jon Snow’s resurrection: “Having died at the end of the fifth season, I was told I’d come back, but they didn’t tell me anything about how. And I thought, “Is it going to be some seismic shift in Jon? Is he going to come back as a nasty person? Is he going to come back as fundamentally changed and altered?” And he comes back, and he’s the same. And then I thought, “Oh.” Sort of what he comes back with is the knowledge about life that very few people have, which is, there is nothing after it. And that’s terrifying for a young man who probably is religious in some ways and thinks he’ll see his father after he dies. He goes to the other side and there is nothing there. That is going to fundamentally change him inside. And it does.

His reaction to his first Emmy nomination: “I was more thrilled by it than I thought I would be. There’s something about a group of people turning around and saying, “We liked what you did.” It made me very happy. I wept. And that wasn’t at all what I expected. I expected to be a lot cooler about it.

The “buried alive in a sea of bodies” part of the Battle of the Bastards: “That piece came about with me and director Miguel Sapochnik having a conversation. Everything had backed up a bit and we were running out of time to shoot what we had intended. Miguel and I talked about what my greatest fears are. And as it happens, one of my greatest fears is a human crush — those horrible stories you hear about stadiums where people literally suffocate to death because they can’t get out of other people panicking. I thought if we could do that in this sequence, that could be really terrifying for the viewer….Strangely enough, without even thinking about it too much, when he breaks free and climbs his way back up, in a way it’s like a rebirth for him. He doesn’t give up. He doesn’t stay down. He fights his way out. It looks a lot like the shot when Daenerys [Emilia Clarke] is being held aloft by the free slaves. That was a happy accident. We didn’t realize how those two would be compared.”

Theories about Season 7: “It’s important to stress at this point that I haven’t had any scripts, so this is all guesswork for me. I think it’s going to get very bleak before if there is a happy ending. If there’s any sort of win or heroic moment for Jon and everyone else. I think it’s going to get very dark before it gets better. I think what we might see this season is those White Walkers and that Army of the Dead really come into force. So that’s going to be exciting to see. I don’t know what it means. I think with the whole “winter is finally here” business, it means everyone is going to have a really bad time.”

Thoughts about the end of Game of Thrones: “It has been in my consciousness a lot. This mammoth, Goliath event in my life, which has so much of what my 20s are, is going to come to an end. I think I’m going to really make the effort in these next two years to enjoy every moment of it, because I don’t know when I’ll get something like this coming around again.”

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

It seems like Kit has – hopefully – moved past the stage where he acts like he’s the most aggrieved person in the room, aggrieved because he’s so famous and he’s such a hunk. I think that version of Kit got quietly phased out this year as he (hopefully) spoke to some publicists and media-relations consultants. This new version of Kit is rather lovely. I loved this: “It made me very happy. I wept. And that wasn’t at all what I expected. I expected to be a lot cooler about it.” Aw. He thought he was going to be all cool about it but he ended up crying! That’s so sweet.

Photos courtesy of WENN, Getty.