As Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch on Game of Thrones, Kit Harington‘s Jon Snow has to be strategically adept in the ways of diplomacy and territorial politics. Harington also pretends to do that in real life, by playing the classic “game of strategy conquest:” Risk.
In a new interview with Elle magazine, the Game of Thrones star shared some of the activities that the cast gets up to during their ample downtime while cloistered away in remote Iceland filming the show. Since the sun goes down around 4:00 p.m., Harington said, they have plenty of spare hours to fill up with hanging about and playing music and games.
“I play Risk,” he explained. “It’s about conquering countries. It’s basically Game of Thrones on a board game. It’s Method.”
With the show’s upcoming seventh season certainly requiring plenty of precision political thinking from Snow and Sansa Stark, let’s hope they got plenty of that Method practice in to help inform their characters’ tricky decisions.
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Write to Raisa Bruner at raisa.bruner@time.com