(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 25 February 2026 21:00, UK
No offence to the lad, but since he hasn’t been in an iconic movie, would you believe Kit Harington when he says one of the most iconic scenes in modern cinema isn’t as good as everyone else says it is?
He’s kept himself busy since Game of Thrones ended with a whimper and widespread outrage, but he still hasn’t found that post-Westeros role that’s bumped his career up a level, something that Jason Momoa, Pedro Pascal, Peter Dinklage, and Hannah Waddingham all managed, to name just a few of his castmates.
Harington hasn’t given a definitive performance outside of Jon Snow, either, and while he’s been solid in a few features and a handful of TV shows, at this rate, he’ll never outrun George RR Martin’s shadow. That doesn’t disqualify him from commenting on what counts as a seminal sequence, but it does place him firmly in the minority.
What makes it even stranger is that the scene in question unfolds in a flick that he called one of his five favourite films of all time, and if you ask 100 people to name two scenes from Michael Mann’s Heat off the top of their heads, there are only a pair of acceptable answers: the freeway shootout, and the decades-in-the-making showdown between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
The latter was an exchange that cinephiles had been waiting to see for the longest time, and the two Academy Award-winning titans delivered. Mann knew that he didn’t need to give them much direction, so he didn’t, and the two masters relied on their instincts to turn the coffee shop tête-à-tête into a classic.
However, Harington would disagree. “It really doesn’t work putting De Niro and Pacino on the same screen, doing a scene together, because they just try to out-act each other,” he offered. “I didn’t like that scene, watching it again. I thought it was almost quite hammy. Their performances individually are incredible, it’s just that they… It’s almost too much acting to take.”
Everyone has their opinions, and they’re free to share them on anything and anyone they want, but insisting that the coffee shop sit-down gets more hype and adulation than it deserves is nuts. The two legends were still hovering around the top of their game in the mid-90s, and as much as Pacino is prone to hamming it up, which he did in Heat more than once, there’s nothing scenery-chewing about it.
Righteous Kill is enough proof that Mann captured lightning in a bottle in pairing De Niro and Pacino, but Harington refused to budge. “It’s like two positive charges going against each other,” he elaborated. “It doesn’t work. They’re amazing, but together, it didn’t work.”
You wouldn’t have to travel too far to find someone who disagrees, and while you can’t really say someone is definitively wrong about something when it’s a matter of personal preference at the end of the day, he’s wrong.