Kit Harington thinks his 'mental health difficulties' were directly caused by 'Game of Thrones' and its intense final seasons

• Kit Harington was going through "mental health difficulties" during the end of "Game of Thrones."

• "I think it was directly to do with the nature of the show," he said on a SiriusXM radio show.

• A week after the series finale aired in May 2019, Harington checked himself into a wellness retreat.

• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Kit Harington is opening up more about how filming the eighth and final season of HBO's biggest hit show "Game of Thrones" affected his own mental heath.

"I went through some mental health difficulties after 'Thrones' - and during the end of 'Thrones,' to be honest," Harington said in a new interview on SiriusXM. "And I think it was directly to do with the nature of the show and what I've been doing for years."

During an interview on "The Jess Cagle Show," the host asked Harington about how he had taken time off to deal with his mental health in 2019. Just over a week after the series finale aired that year, news broke that Harington had checked himself into a "wellness retreat."

"Kit has decided to utilize this break in his schedule as an opportunity to spend some time at a wellness retreat to work on some personal issues," his representative told Insider via a statement at the time.

Harington previously suggested that many of the other actors involved in the series finale of "Game of Thrones" found it took both an emotional and physical toll on them. In January of 2019, Harington told GQ Australia "the last season of 'Thrones' seemed designed to break us."

"Everyone was broken at the end," he said. "I don't know if we were crying because we were sad it was ending or if we were crying because it was so f------ tiring."

In the subsequent year, Harington and his wife Rose Leslie (who was also his "Game of Thrones" costar) welcomed their first child together. And now the actor is back to doing TV work, but this time with a more emotionally light role in Amazon's "Modern Love."

"I took a break after 'Thrones,'" Harington said. "I said, 'I don't want to work for a year, I want to really concentrate on myself.' And I'm really happy I did that."

He went on tell the SiriusXM host that the COVID-19 pandemic hit just when he was wanting to come back to work. Eventually, he was able to start filming for his episode of Amazon's romantic anthology series, which premieres August 13 on Amazon Prime.

Harington said: "Doing this 'Modern Love' episode was like: 'You don't have to live in that intense place all the time. Why don't you do something that takes the weight off? Why don't you do something fun?'"

A representative for HBO didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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