Jon Snow Wants You To Know Winter Isn't Actually Coming

It's the line from the Game of Thrones pilot heard round the world: "Winter is Coming." These Stark words have been their family's motto as long as anyone can remember.

For the first four seasons of the show, it was believed these worlds were just reflecting the inevitability of the seasons. But as winter arrived in Westeros, the Night King approached. And his calling card -- a whiteout-conditions blizzard that contained a murderous army of wights -- gave that phrase a whole new meaning.

Filming winter in Westeros on the other hand, has given Jon Snow actor Kit Harington a completely different perspective. Like his father (uncle, whatever) before him, he's here with words of warning: Winter Is Not Coming.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, he said looking for locations to film deep winter, and discovering how few there were, was frightening.

[It] was a very sad irony: We went to Iceland to find snow, because winter is [there]. We got there and we were lucky to get the snow we did because, in our world, winter is definitely not here. It's this weird parallel, the opposite parallel. We go out there this year, and the glacier that me and [former co-star Rose Leslie] filmed on four years ago, I saw it and it has shrunk. I saw climate change and global warming with my own eyes, and it is terrifying.

Despite the parallels in both the changing conditions of Westeros and Earth, Harington thinks Game of Thrones will only grow more in popularity this year. People need the escape from the current political realities. “Westeros maybe feels like a nice escapism compared to what you're seeing on the news because the world's politics has gotten very, very dark in recent weeks and months.”

Hopefully, despite our planet not cooperating, we'll still feel the chill of a Westerosi winter this July, when Game of Thrones returns.