The latest episode of Game of Thrones was a bit of a shocker. Now I’m saying a bit because fan speculation was correct after all, but this a television series known for its twists and turns, and we can never really be too sure where it will take us.

Part of the blame for this apparent uncertainty is the insistence of Kit Harington, who plays Jon Snow, that his character is dead. He did not exactly lie, though; Jon Snow was dead, and he did state that he would be playing a corpse, which, for all intents and purposes, was true.

Despite all that, the world is just happy to see Jon Snow resurrected, despite Harington’s initial deception. The actor has decided to break his silence and give a wholehearted apology.

“I’d like to say sorry for lying to everyone. I’m glad that people were upset that he died. I think my biggest fear was that people were not going to care. Or it would just be, ‘Fine, Jon Snow’s dead.’ But it seems like people had a, similar to the Red Wedding episode, kind of grief about it. Which means something I’m doing — or the show is doing — is right,” Harington told Entertainment Weekly in an interview.

But it seems that the fans are not the only ones he lied to because even his colleagues in Game of Thrones had to be kept in the dark.

Producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss apparently told him about the eventual revival of his character as far back as the summer of 2014 when the cast received the Season 5 scripts, but, knowing how a plot can be easily leaked out these days, they gave him strict instructions to keep it a secret — even to most of the cast and crew.

He had to convince everyone that he was leaving. “At first I thought I would find it fun,” Harington told Entertainment Weekly. “This will be a fun game. But I had to lie to a lot of close friends and cast members and crew. The longer it went, the more I felt like I was betraying them. So I did end up letting people in, slowly.”

Sophie Turner, who plays his sister Sansa, was so convinced by the subterfuge that she penned him a goodbye letter. “Sophie Turner, bless her, wrote me a really long letter about how much she loved working with me – and I still got it,” Harington said, then cheekily added, “That made me chuckle.”

And, to rub it in, the scenes where he had to play a corpse for two episodes were quite easy-going for him.

“It was such an easy two episodes, I loved it,” he said.