“I think there’s something weird going on with music at the moment,” Kit Harington muses, lowering his voice an octave, as if talking to himself and not a cadre of reporters recording his every word.

Jon Snow has just discovered Spotify.

He continues, leaning forward: “And I’m part of it. It’s great; it’s a revolution. But we’re not listening to albums anymore. We’re not listening to someone’s story from back to front. Some of my favorite albums [are by] Nick Cave. And it’s poetry; each song leads into the next song and the next song, and you have to listen to it in order. It’s great that technology is now providing us with suggestions. But it’s providing us with singular suggestions. I try to download albums as much as I can.”

It becomes clear, over the course of a roundtable interview promoting Testament of Youth at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA, that these moments of introspection are common for the 28 year old British actor.

These days, those moments rarely come in private for the Game of Thrones star, as the show nears its fifth season conclusion, coinciding with the U.S. release of his new film Testament of Youth, a tragic WWI-era romance that sees the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch play a (clean shaven!) soldier (with a haircut!) lost on the frontlines of The Great War in the sumptuous adaptation of Vera Brittain’s classic memoir.

In many ways, Kit feels like the perfect Hollywood heartthrob, as if created in a lab: the hair, the stubble, the accent, the soulful nature. Check. Check. Check and check. You also know he’s resistant to that characterization, but it’s hard not to come away swooning for the self-professed hopeless romantic. Perhaps feeling the skepticism in the room, he said it again: “I’m a hopeless romantic. No I am, and it’s to my downfall sometimes.”

Right now, it seems like he’s doing okay, one of the few moral compasses remaining on a show that takes pleasure in killing fan-favorites. His identification as Jon Snow in and outside of the industry is precisely why Harington pursued the role of Roland Leighton in Testament of Youth. “It was really important for me that I got to do this movie. Because the industry in general, I think, still sees me, which is something I never would have predicted, as an action hero, sort of very much in the Jon Snow mold. I have to find things for my own creative sanity to break out of that, and this was one of those pieces.”

Yet, as I myself thought, isn’t Jon Snow far from your traditional action hero? “But he’s more of a classic action hero in a way. He’s much more than that but in the world of Thrones that’s the role he fills. We sympathize with him. He’s a nice guy, he’s a hero. He’s got a brooding intensity, he lives very up in here,” Kit says, gesturing to his forehead. It’s clearly a place the London native lives, too.

“But Roland was not that. He was very different from that, in that he’s kind of an arrogant, cocksure young man. ‘You know, I can help you into Oxford. I’ve done the entrance exams. Why don’t you let the man tell you how this is done?’ Pat on the head. And we should feel slightly angry at him because of that. It was a delicate dance to play Roland, because he has to be arrogant, and full of himself. In real life, he was the top of the class, he was the guy at school, he was incredibly intelligent, he was picked for great things. But you have to like him at the same time. I was worried about that. I kept trying to push him more serious, and James [Kent, the film’s director] was like ‘No, you have to be light, or else people won’t like him.’ And he was right on that front, and I think we found it in the end.”

When asked what he has in common with Roland, Kit admits: “I was an arrogant sod when I was younger. I still am.” Again, sensing skeptics, he repeated his assertion. You get the sense that Kit Harington has to prove himself among skeptics often, and he’s gotten good at it.

“I related to [Roland] a lot actually. He’s one of those people who’s absolutely obsessed with heroism and writing, and the romance of art and literature. I kind of was that as well. In some ways, we were very similar, in that we had similar interests and we had a certain arrogance at a young age. In other ways, I was much more serious as a kid.”

Kit seems serious as an adult, loosening up only on a few topics, particularly when music is concerned. This should come as no surprise to fans who watched the hilarious Red Nose Day Game of Thrones musical spoof.

“When [Red Nose Day] was suggested, I said yes instantly, because it’s comic relief and it’s for a good cause and it would be wrong to say no and that went against every fiber of my being reading the script and knowing I had to sing in front of my peers. So part of me was like I really don’t want to do this. The other part of me was like I must do this, so if I have to make a fool of myself for a good cause, then I should. So I did, and it was very funny, serenading Rose [Leslie, interviewed in September]. Yeah, I enjoyed that. I did karaoke with Coldplay as my back up band, that goes down as a big ticket. I got up there and I was nervous, and then I was like, yeah this is fucking cool. You don’t get to do this very often, if ever.”

True to his romantic sensibilities, Harington gets excited when talking about the romance between his character and Vera (the luminous Alicia Vikander). “Sorry to bag on, but there’s one moment in [their courtship] you might miss with Joanna Scanlon, who plays their chaperone. There’s a brilliant moment in the art gallery, where she is looking at a painting and you can see she’s completely lost in the romance of it. This is a woman who’s probably the youngest of her family and therefore would never have had a chance to marry, and she’s caught up in this romantic idea of a painting, while the two kids are running off and actually living it. It’s a really beautiful moment that Joanna herself found [and said], ‘I’d like to be lost in it.’”

It’s easy to get lost in the sweeping, old-school romance between Kit and Alicia Vikander’s characters. To hear Kit tell it, acting opposite Vikander is just as formidable a task as taking on a White Walker. “I think having a scene with Alicia is almost a bit like doing battle in the best possible way. She’s so fierce and so determined and knows precisely, exactly what she wants in a scene. And you have to battle her to get what you want. [She’s] not ungenerous, she’s very clear. I found that quite exciting to work off. She’s fabulous.”

Kit Harington’s poetry skills, however, are not, quick to call them “abysmal.” He continues, “I actually like writing poetry, I’m just not very good at it.” Roland’s poems are integral to Testament of Youth and he’s clearly a scholar on the matter. “One of the most crushing things I found about doing this role…You know when she [Vera] says [his work is] derivative? They are. They’re like Robert Graves’ poems. He’s obviously a big fan of Robert Graves. He’s doing his impersonation of him. One of the saddest things I think is that he’s very good. He’s young. He’s 19. He’s working out his style. It’s one of the saddest things, is that he’s not quite there yet, he’s got so much room to progress as a writer and he’s killed before he gets the chance.”

He’s also killed before he gets a chance to consummate his relationship with Vera, forcing Kit Harington to grapple with a long-foreign concept: virginity. “I was the oldest out of the group of four of us, at 27, and playing a 19 year old. All through that courtship I had to keep reminding myself that I, Kit, would never have had sex to that point [and] would be very, very immature as far as that’s concerned, and this would be incredibly exciting. It was quite hard to sort of drag myself back to where handholding or tickling would send kind of a shiver up my spine.”

Considering his relative youth and that his most substantial work has come on TV, it may come as a surprise that Harington still feels at home on the stage. “I was taken to the theater a lot as a kid, maybe twice a week. I fell in love with the stage first and foremost and went to a stage school. Actually, considering that a good 15 of my years were spent going to theater, I’ve been in this industry of film and TV for maybe 6. It still feels a little alien to me at times.”

The first play he remembers attending was The Wind in the Willows at the National when he was 5 or 6 (“It was amazing”). His first performance came after seeing Waiting for Godot, taking that back to his school at 14. “We had someone come in and do Lucky’s speech absolutely fucking terribly. He forgot his lines halfway through and I kept whispering [the lines] to him.”

His first professional performance came playing Albert Narracott in War Horse, and Testament of Youth marks a return to World War One. “I was strangely enraptured by that war, like I think a lot of young people are, from the age of 15. I was taken to the war graves by my father, almost as a rite of passage. He took me and my brother on separate occasions. Not really as a father-son bonding trip, just that he felt it was important to see, not in a patriotic way, but to see the consequence of war. There’s no greater visual consequence of war than seeing the Northern French war graves where you can see the list of men on the walls and you can see the fields of graves. At that point, I took history, because in the syllabus there was a bit about the First World War, I took English literature because they were studying the war poets. I got anthology after anthology of war poems.”

You can’t fake the enthusiasm and reverence he has for the time period. “I don’t know why it struck such a chord with me, but I remember going on that trip, and another on a school trip, at 18, and you know [that’s] when your hormones are going crazy, and you just fancy women, you’re just discovering sex, and a school trip could just turn into a massive shag fest. But actually everyone was so sobered, that it really in a way took away from all that to [see] these people, these young men and women that were our young age.”

Testament of Youth is very much a love letter to classic wartime cinema, and has many influences, perhaps most strikingly to David Lean’s Brief Encounter. Like in Lean’s film, Testament of Youth features a take on the iconic train station farewell between lovers scene, a circumstance practically imprinted on our society. “I loved that scene. James [Kent] played hard house music [before the take], which was fucking hilarious. He said ‘We’re going to play some music now,’ and he was very serious about it. ‘I just want you to roll with it.’ I was expecting Wagner or something, some sort of sweeping romantic [music]. Then this hard house trance-y music came on. I think I laughed through the first take, but it was really useful, it upped the energy, it upped the urgency of that scene.”

The film was James Kent’s (The White Queen) first feature film and initially, that showed, according to Harington. “I think he was very nervous. I remember being on set the first day, and in all honesty when a director’s nervous, you’re nervous. For the first few days, I felt unsure because he was unsure. And then we found a rhythm.” Throughout the shoot, Harington “felt in very safe hands.”

When published, Testament of Youth was a landmark moment in the pacifism movement, as Vera Brittain became a prominent war protestor. Kit, always careful and considerate, well-practiced at junkets, is reticent to comment on the subject. “I don’t feel like I’m qualified to talk too much about pacifism. I don’t know enough about it. I feel like I consider myself a pacifist. I think I know I consider myself a pacifist. I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that.”

But he knows what to listen to on a grumpy Monday morning: the Talking Heads. “You know that…what’s it called?” mirroring every conversation you’ve ever had when a friend tries to recommend you a song. Kit starts humming, vocalizing random words, banging his hands on the table, creating a beat, the writers in the room serving as a think tank to figure out the title: “Once in a Lifetime.” Now remembered, Kit brings it up on his phone instantaneously and enthusiastically, joking that it’ll play for the rest of the interview. “That’ll wake you up in the morning.”

This morning, Kit Harington hopes his fans will find Testament of Youth. “I think that in passing a poster you wouldn’t recognize me in this movie. I think the hardcore fan of Thrones will go and see this. I think one of the reasons, other than just playing the part, that I was important for this piece, was that you hoped it would bring a younger audience, the Thrones audience. I hope that Thrones fans do go and see this, because I want them to see me in a different role as well, just on a personal level.”

Given that Vera Brittain is a strong character, how would she do on Game of Thrones, I asked, a purposefully ridiculous question that came close to breaching the mandated “no Game of Thrones questions” rule. Cautiously, Kit responds, “I think she’d do pretty well. She’s a hard woman and I think she’s very very…You have to be pretty fucking intelligent in the Thrones world not to get killed.”

After a momentary pause, he adds, “I don’t know how Jon Snow has gotten as far as he has.” Again, we’re skeptical: Jon Snow isn’t a dumby. “He’s not a dumby, but he’s not the cleverest.”

It’s clear that Kit Harington is no dumby himself, that unlike his once-in-a-lifetime TV character, he knows far more than nothing, a soulful, measured man yearning for creative freedom, fighting against type-casting and the stereotype of a Hollywood heartthrob. It’s an age-old problem. Indeed, in the immortal words of David Byrne, it’s the “same as it ever was.”

In the limited time I spent with Kit, I found myself rooting for him just as I root for Jon Snow, even as he inevitably tries to distance himself away from the character, hoping that whatever’s to come isn’t the same as it ever was.

Today is the LA and NY opening of the splendid World War I war romance Testament of Youth, a film expanding next week.

Filmmakers generally focus their powers upon the evils of World War II, granted with the blindingly obvious demarcation between good and evil. Too few films tackle World War I, a time when global conflict still felt heroic, and the after-effects of which directly caused the suffering and horrors of WWII. Testament of Youth is a WWI era romance, a sumptuously shot  anti-war period piece from director James Kent (The White Queen), adapted from Vera Brittain’s classic memoir.

In many ways, Kent’s film feels like a composite of every war romance, one full of clichés. But it springs from reality, the source of cliché, and thanks to its endearing earnestness, honesty and a tremendous cadre of young actors, Testament of Youth proves to be sweepingly romantic and heartbreaking, even if we all know what’s about to happen. In fact, that inevitability hangs over the proceedings, making it all the more poignant and powerful.

Vera Britain (Alicia Vikander, deserving of every kind of praise) is a Jane Austen-like protagonist, a singular woman from an austere family, who combats her old-school father (Dominic West) and yearns for Oxford. She rants against marriage just as a clean shaven Kit Harington saunters into her life, a sheepish grin on his face. This is Roland Leighton, and their shared desire and longing is automatic, and completely convincing [to read my interview with Kit, go here].

Over the summer before their shared studious efforts at Oxford await, the pair swap letters and share their poetry. It’s such over-the-top teenaged love, but we buy it completely, and it’s made even more adorable because of how chaste it all is. When the two go on a date, their joined by a chaperone, Aunt Belle (Joanna Scanlon), the young couple stealing glances, a moment’s joining of hands, a tickle on the neck, whenever they get a chance.

It’s a dreamlike romance, but all dreams must come to an end. When the war bells chime, Roland opts to sign up rather than join Vera at Oxford. He bids farewell at a train station, a scene reminiscent of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a romantic setting practically ingrained in our DNA. Roland’s joined by the other two young men in Vera’s life, her loving brother Edward (Taron Egerton) and the friend zoned Victor (Colin Morgan). They’re all so naïve, so blissfully unaware of the tragedy to come, assured of their return and the briefness of this war.

Obviously, it doesn’t happen that way, as Vera suffers heartbreak after heartbreak. As Vera’s headmistress and mentor Miss Lorimer (Miranda Richardson) grunts, “Men fight, women stay back and knit.” This wasn’t acceptable to Vera, who couldn’t obsess over the papers, scanning page after page of the names of the deceased. She quits Oxford, the only dream she ever had, to join the war effort as a nurse, desperate to do something.

Before even the title credits began, Testament of Youth opens with distant explosions, the machinations of war echoing from the past. These explosions are omnipresent, the pervasiveness of war reaching throughout Europe even as they stay in the background. This is a war movie, but we glimpse very little of the battlefront. After all, Testament of Youth is seen through the eyes of Vera, and showcases what a woman suffered through while on the sideline in the 1920s. When Roland returns home on leave, Vera urges him to tell her everything, not to censor himself on her account. Her imagined horrors are far worse than anything he could describe for her. And that’s exactly what ends up haunting her: she’s forced to imagine the deaths of friends, family, lover and thousands of others, and leaves her as broken on Armistice Day as a soldier suffering from PTSD.

Alicia Vikander is something else. This film rests on Vikander’s performance; indeed Kent quite literally often rests the camera on her face, strength and vulnerability pouring from her. Vikander was stunning for completely different reasons in Ex Machina, and she’s again breathtaking here, carrying the movie and the many burdens of Vera Brittain in such a way that we can see every twinge of her psyche. It’s impossible to watch Testament of Youth without acknowledging that we’re witnessing the birth of an actress capable of nearly anything. Her stardom seems assured.

It was similarly refreshing to see Kit Harington out of black, even if, like Jon Snow, his character knows nothing. The charming Taron Egerton burst onto the scene with Kingsman, and he continues to be a revelation as Edward. Vera’s relationship with her brother is one of the most important in the film. They’re allies; Edward lobbies for Vera to go to Oxford, whereas Vera lobbies for Edward to go to war, something she’ll never forgive herself for. Their relationship might be more stirring than her and Roland, especially considering the tragedy enmeshed in the subtext. I adored the pair of them; it’s not often you see a brother and sister being so loving and supportive and friendly together. Colin Morgan, while given less to play with, imbues strength, honor and dignity into Victor, a man who could’ve been petty about Vera’s choice, but refuses to be pitied. But we pity him anyway. We pity them all.

Testament of Youth feels dated and old-school, and almost nostalgic for the romance of yore, but it’s no less relevant today with its anti-war message. After WWI, Vera Brittain became an outspoken pacifist, an activist speaking out against the inexhaustible cycle of violence, urging Britain to break the never-ending thirst for revenge. In many ways, Testament of Youth ends where it could’ve began, and one wonders if it might not be a more compelling or at least different one. But as it stands, Vera’s plea for pacifism feels all the more tragic knowing that she isn’t listened to, and that perhaps if more people had, WWI could’ve been prevented. Instead, explosions in the Middle East and around the world remain pervasive in the background, her universal message never more important.

Testament of Youth opens June 5^th in New York and LA.

In 2010, Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon came out and charmed everyone in theaters, young and old alike. The film was adapted from Cressida Cowell’s book, and featured a sterling voice cast headlined by Jay Baruchel (This Is The End), Gerard Butler (300), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (SuperBad) and Kristen Wiig (Bridesmaids). Now four years later, a sequel is coming, arriving June 13th.

At WonderCon this year, star Jay Baruchel and writer-director Dean DeBlois sat down for a press conference to inform us about the next adventure in the series. What follows are the highlights from the genial conversation.

The first question concerned Valka, the mother of Hiccup, voiced by Cate Blanchett. Apparently, DeBlois wanted Valka and her genes to be a big reveal in the movie… but DreamWorks changed that with the first trailer. Dean describes Valka as a Dian Fossey like character, who lives with dragons and learns their ways.

Since the first movie, the HTTYD world has expanded, thanks to its Cartoon Network TV series (and video games), Dragons: Riders of Berk, which serves to bridge the gap in movies. It helps present a full, complete story. According to Baruchel, the cool thing about the  TV show is that they’re able to delve into the everyday life at Berk. The show enables them to put the audience in that neighborhood, on that island, and reveal the minutiae of everyday being a Viking.

In the first film, Hiccup got everything he wanted. So the filmmakers had to go on to the next problem. They didn’t want to make a sequel for the sake of making a sequel (and making a viking boat load of cash). Dean planned a trilogy, and this sequel is the middle act, immersing everyone in the disappearance of dragons and what happened, while completing Hiccup’s coming of age story. DeBlois states there is a lot of stuff to explore, to venture off into the rich world that Cowell created. For DeBlois, it’s a “fun world to live in, [and] very easy to write.” Lucky dude.

It’s pointed out how rare it is for a big star like Jay Baruchel to work on an animated television show like Dragons. But according to Baruchel, it had to be him, as he feels a certain loyalty to the character, and ownership of Hiccup. He believes that’s a part of acting, and clearly feels very strongly when he says: “I just didn’t want anyone else to play him.” Dean DeBlois responds, “Neither do we,” to which Baruchel sighed: “Thank you, that’s good news.”

Baruchel gets asked what it’s like returning to the character of Hiccup, but “selfishly,” the show has “kept me in that mind space.” He “never left” Hiccup.

How does Jay get ready for voice acting? He wakes up…showers, hell, sometimes he doesn’t even have to. That’s the great thing about voice acting: no costume or makeup. Sometimes, he even gives himself a mission tonot shower for two weeks. Maybe because of that, he “adore[s] it.” When Baruchel started acting, when he was twelve years old, now twenty years ago, one of the first gigs he had was dubbing shows from French to English in Montreal. “If you can do dubbing, you can do anything. Its as intensive as voice acting gets.” Baruchel is a “chronic daydreamer…and that’s what’s required…as there are no dragons in front of me, or anywhere else in the world, I suspect.”

Dean and Jay have now worked together for 7 years, and they clearly have a comfortable shorthand, another reason Jay has stuck with the character so closely.

According to DeBlois, Baruchel embodies the character so well, that he’s become the authority on it. After Baruchel’s input, he’ll change the dialogue, and add more life to it.

Apparently there were ten different dragon genera (which is the plural of genus, btw) in How to Train Your Dragon, a fact presented that impressed Jay immensely. Judging by the trailer there a whole lot more this time around. How many can we expect in the sequel? The animation team utilizes a modular system “to create an endless variety of dragons…thousands of new dragons.” While there are a ton of dragons in the sequel, there are about the same amount of dragons who have hero moments in the sequel.

While making HTTYD2, Jay was only in the same room with another actor ONCE. It’s a very international cast, and “one of the cool things about voice acting, [is] that doesn’t step in the way, [we] still find a way to create.” Usually they do so in isolation, and DeBlois admits, “it’s nice when we get characters together…sometimes [they] go off script, and it feels right.” When making an animated film, “the voice acting is the only spontaneous element,” while “everything else is meticulously planned.”

How does the process work? They record voice actors first, then get breakdowns of those lines, and make the requisite animation, match the dialogue with the mouths of the characters. Sometimes they receive late notes that will “necessitate going back and adjusting.”

As per usual, the sequel is bigger than the original. The “scope gets really big,” as Hiccup discovers there’s a brewing conflict, a conflict incited by “a vicious conqueror” who’s creating a dragon army. That’d be Drago Bludvist, voiced by Blood Diamond‘s Djimon Honsou. Jon Snow himself, Kit Harington, plays Eret, son of Eret, an evil dragon hunter, while Cate Blanchett’s character tries to rescue the dragons.

Again, it’s pointed out how much Baruchel adores the character, and that he will argue his case for changes made to the film. He likes to think he’s one of the people who knows Hiccup the best, and “they allow me to chime in.” They more than allow it, as Dean puts it: “Hiccup is so similar to Jay in so many ways…” and that they normally side with Jay, because they know Jay is the “greatest authority on the character.”

What’s the plan for the franchise moving forward? They’re preparing for the 3rd season of the TV show, and “hoping to create a seamless narrative.” Essentially, they want to keep exploring Cowell’s novels, further developing the world, and “go as far as we can.” Dean isn’t aware of any of the specifics of other things beyond the sequel, in terms of other mediums and expansion.

The funny joke at the end for the press conference is that Dean does a lot of temporary voicing, as a placeholder before Jay comes in and replaces him. From the sound of it, it’s not very good, in a wonderful way. Baruchel, through legitimate snorts, admits that it “makes my life wonderful…his temp work…” He loves it, and it’s the reason he gets up in the morning.

On Friday June 13th, the only reason we’ll need to get up in the morning is that How to Train Your Dragon 2 has flown into the local cineplex. I suspect I won’t be the only one.