Yahoo News Thrones' Kit Harington defends violence in new show
Kit Harington is just a few days away from exploding onto our screens once again, making the long wait until Game of Thrones' final season premieres seem less of a gaping void of nothingness.
In Gunpowder, Harington stars as Robert Catesby – a gentleman who was the driving force behind the failed Gunpowder Plot that planned to blow up parliament in 1605 – and follows him as he struggles as a Catholic man in Protestant England, which was dragging him to the edge of financial, social and psychological ruin.
Now, anyone who knows anything at all about the infamous Gunpowder Plot knows that it ends up more than a little bit bloody, and when Digital Spy stomped around the muddy set of Gunpowder to interview Kit, the actor didn't shy away from the fact that this series will get pretty violent.
"It's a very violent time, we have to show the violence the Catholics incurred, the violence in this period, to show why they might have gone on to do these things," he told us.
"We can't avoid that, we can't avoid the torture that these men went through, we can't avoid the executions that the people around them suffered. What we're trying to do is shoot as much [violence] as we can, and see what's appropriate later."
As for whether or not the violence should be shown in the first place, Kit maintains that it's fine as long as it's not thrown in for the sake of it.
"Audiences will accept a great level of violence as long as it's justified," he continued. "With Thrones, I've always felt the violence is justified, because, unlike so many things, we see how it affects people.
"If you see someone die, you see the effect on the person who's killed them, and the people around them. As long as you do that, as long as you're not gratuitous, you can show violence. And it's definitely not gratuitous in Gunpowder."
Gunpowder also stars Downton Abbey's Tom Cullen as Guy Fawkes and Mark Gatiss as Chief Robert Cecil, spymaster and head of torture to the Catholics, while Liv Tyler plays Catesby's cousin Anne Vaux.
Gunpowder begins this Saturday (October 21) at 9.10pm on BBC One, with the whole series available on iPlayer after the first episode airs.
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