Game of Thrones stars challenge big banks over fossil fuel links
The Game of Thrones stars and real-life couple Kit Harington and Rose Leslie are co-starring in a Richard Curtis short film highlighting the “toxic relationship” between UK high street banks and the fossil fuel industry.
The Couples Therapy film is part of Curtis’s Make My Money Matter campaign to raise awareness of how consumers’ cash may be financing industries that are destroying the planet.
In the film, Harington and Leslie play a couple sitting on a sofa in a therapist’s office attempting to work through their issues. It gradually emerges that Harington’s character represents a high street bank, and has been hiding his love for Leslie’s character, who represents an oil company.
The film ends with the pair kissing passionately and an on-screen message saying that “our banks are in a hidden relationship” with fossil fuel companies that is fuelling the climate emergency. “Help break them up,” it adds.
The campaign calls on the big five UK banks – Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest and Santander – to stop financing new oil, gas and coal expansion, and said it was inviting the public to join it in “pressuring them to stop”.
According to the latest Banking on Climate Chaos report, published this month, the big five banks funnelled a total of $37.3bn (£30bn) towards the fossil fuel sector in 2022.
Curtis, who has written films including Love Actually, Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, and is also the co-founder of Comic Relief, said: “It’s a public education campaign. We used to not think about supply chains and where our clothes were made, we used to not think about plastic bottles or what the companies we work for were doing.”
Harington, who starred as Jon Snow in the TV series Game of Thrones, said: “Myself and Rose
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