It’s amazing what people do for love. Fly nonstop around the globe just to deliver a birthday present in person. Launch a thousand ships. Launch like four start-ups. Work and work and work until one can finally buy that classic six uptown that his or her love has been going on about. Dress up as your own popular character on an acclaimed HBO television show for a themed birthday party because your significant other says so.

That last one may be the experience only of Kit Harington, Game of Thrones’s Jon Snow, but anyone in love can relate. He told the British tabloid Heat magazine per Daily Mail that he recently attended a 30th birthday party with Rose Leslie, his fiancée and former Thrones co-star. The theme was “bad taste.” He can take it from here:

So I went to the one costume shop that was open, and the woman who worked there said, ‘You know, you really look like the guy from Game of Thrones, and I’ve got a Game of Thrones outfit.” And she pulled out a Jon Snow costume, and Rose just whispered in my ear, “I won’t love you if you don’t wear it . . . You should do it.”

The people bringing round canapés were looking at me, thinking, “You sad man! You’ve come dressed as your character.” I think the woman in the shop realized who I was as I was leaving. But that’s even sadder: me going to a fancy dress shop and buying a Jon Snow costume.

Harington has really been dining out on Leslie stories throughout his press tour for his new three-part BBC One drama, Gunpowder, to delightful ends. Here, he’s with British talk-show host Jonathan Ross, sharing a video of that time he scared the living daylights out of Leslie in their kitchen. There, he’s talking about the darling proposal. He’s good at this game! Leslie and he are clearly as much of a dream team as Jon and Ygritte were north of the wall.

And it’s stories like these that has helped Harington stand out in the colossal cast of Game of Thrones, and achieve his own kind of stardom. You don’t have to watch the show to know who he is. You just have to be a moderate consumer of entertainment gossip. He’s a virtuoso of the promotional circuit form, that parade of fancy clothes and charming anecdotes and project plugs which offer a brief reprieve the roiling pox threatening to consume all of planet earth. And people say celebrities don’t matter matter!

Besides his ace in the hole—that is, stories involving Leslie—his clothing and hair maintenance only gotten better (here, watch him clean up over the years. It’s deeply satisfying.) And finally, he gives his all in the silly bits he’s made to do on late-night shows as they chase the viral video white whale—like reading for all the other major parts on Game of Thrones for Jimmy Kimmel, for example. It’s fun! That confused shopkeeper’s confusion aside, most people, old or young, HBO subscription or not, could at the very least say, “Oh right, he’s that guy from Game of Whatsits?”