Kit Harington plays his own ancestor in BBC drama Gunpowder
He plays gunpowder plotter Robert Catesby in the new series.
Game Of Thrones star Kit Harington will portray one of his ancestors when new BBC drama Gunpowder debuts tonight.
The actor, best known for his role of Jon Snow in the smash hit Sky Atlantic fantasy epic, stars opposite Liv Tyler in the drama as Robert Catesby, a Warwickshire man who was the mastermind behind the plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November 5 in 1605.
“So I wasn’t aiming to play my ancestor – it just so happened that Catesby was the one that fitted.
“You go that far back and everyone is related to everyone, really.”
“I knew that Robert Catesby was the leader of the gunpowder plot and so as a kid I would kind of go, ‘it wasn’t Guy Fawkes, it was Robert Catesby’, but I didn’t know any more than that, so it kind of came about in me knowing that strange quirk in my family history.
“But I learned about this through thinking about this piece, rather than knowing all about this piece of history and therefore wanting to make a piece about it.
Gunpowder begins on October 21 at 9.10pm on BBC One.
