Game of Thrones stars Kit Harington, Emilia Clarke submitting as leads at Golden Globes

For the entirety of its run, Game of Thrones has had it’s entire cast submitted in supporting roles at all of the major awards shows, and it doesn’t require much thought for that to make sense. This is a show with such an enormous cast that it doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense for HBO to start classifying some people as “leads” whereas others are “supporting.” They have all shared roughly the same amount of screen time for ages!

However, this seems to be changing for the Golden Globes this year. According to Gold Derby, Kit Harington and Emilia Clarke will be submitted as leads this year. Given that it’s an unprecedented move for the show it’s a surprise, but when you think about the pair’s screen time this past season it’s really not. These are two performers who, thanks in part to the deaths of so many other major characters, are in the spotlight more than ever. They also shared a good many scenes together and you can argue that it made each other even stronger as performers.

Will submitting as a lead help the two of them get a nomination this year? You can make the case that it could, but they were probably favorites to get one in the Supporting category anyway. This is more HBO hedging their bets that they can get more nominations for a variety of cast members. If you recall, the Globes tend to lump all genres of television into two Supporting categories, one for men and one for women. This makes it very hard to get multiple nominees from the same show in there. Now, Game of Thrones could in theory have a much stronger footprint across the entire ballot.

As for whether or not this is a trend that carries over to the Primetime Emmy Awards next summer, it’s possible and even likely. We don’t think it’s a good move for HBO to designate the two performers as leads at the Golden Globes and then Supporting elsewhere, since at that point it just makes it seem as though they are screwing around with the rules for the sake of trying to play the awards-show game instead of submitting actors where they should be. They were pretty much leads on Game of Thrones season 7, so classify them as that and move along.

What do you think about this change, and do you think that it helps Harington and Clarke get some more awards love in the end? Share below!

Be sure to also check out our own Golden Globes article series here at CarterMatt for our assessment on a number of big categories. You can also like us on Facebook for even more TV news. (Photo: HBO.)