A Hero Returns: Sean Bean interview

18 April 11

The Brit actor on his role in the eagerly anticipated Game Of Thrones.

Words by Quentin Falk

Few contemporary actors can have worn period or fantasy costume and wielded suitably appropriate weaponry as regularly and successfully as Sean Bean.

Whether recreating Bernard Cornwell’s courageous army officer Richard Sharpe in a successful series of 19th Century-set ITV adventures or playing the honourable Boromir in the epic Lord Of The Rings film saga, Bean has heroic down to a tee.

So it might seem like typecasting to find Bean once again at the centre of things in HBO’s Game Of Thrones, one of the most ambitious new TV series of recent years, which begins a much anticipated 10-part run on Sky later this month.

“It’s a great thing to be typecast,” says Bean. ”I happen to enjoy playing those kind of roles, riding horses, swinging swords, having fights wearing wigs and growing beards… not, though, first thing in the morning when it takes you about three hours to get ready.”

Game Of Thrones is adapted from the first part of American writer George RR Martin’s bestselling Song Of Fire and Ice novel sequence, first published in 1996. Inspired by everything from the Wars of the Roses to Scott’s Ivanhoe, Martin stages his tale in 298-99 AL (After Landing), a date as mythic as its setting in the Seven Kingdoms of the continent Westeros.

More Medieval Europe than Middle-Earth, this is, Bean assures us, no mild take on an ingeniously invented history. “It’s got disturbing characters, plots, political alliances, corruption and…,” adds Bean with almost lip-smacking relish, “… loads of sex and violence.”

Not that Bean is any stranger to the latter, either on TV or the big screen, recalling his roles in, say, the BBC’s 1993 full-frontal Lady Chatterley as well as films like Patriot Games and The Hitcher, not to mention even stronger recent fare such as Outlaw and Black Death.

The scale of the production was incredible. It was like shooting 10 feature films in six months.

But even Bean, 51, was, he admits, quite surprised at the potential content of Game Of Thrones when he was first introduced to the material by writer/executive producer David Benioff with whom he’d worked on Troy.

No, he hadn’t heard of Martin’s work, unlike the devoted fan base whose fervour is now approaching veritable fever pitch at the prospect of a no-holds-barred, big budget HBO teleseries.

“I kind of read the scripts and the book in tandem and thought that if this was how it’s going to be then I definitely want to be in it. I don’t know where George got it all from but he must have an incredible imagination. It’s all very dark, dense and multilayered. Anyway, they’ve done a great job of adapting it for TV.”

Bean plays Lord Eddard ‘Ned’ Stark, a happily married father and warrior summoned by the King to be his right-hand man: “He has values and is, above all, very loyal.” A “man from the North’, like Bean himself, a proud South Yorkshireman who, among his three resident tattoos, has two extolling his beloved Sheffield United FC (the third is a LOTR memento).

Bean’s CV suggests he never stops working – “no, I’m not a workaholic, I like being at home in the garden, really” – and he has at least three new films in the pipeline including a 3D sequel to chiller Silent Hill, a WWII Boys’ Own adventure Age Of Heroes, and a terrorism thriller Cleanskin.

One of the big bonuses of Game Of Thrones was shooting much of it in Northern Ireland – “only an hour by plane from home”. Not that he had that much time off during filming. ”The scale of the thing was incredible,” he enthuses. “It was like shooting 10 feature films in six months.”