GUARDIAN – For some lucky actors, there are moments when their career suddenly shifts into a higher gear. The right part comes along, the world notices, and boom! their whole life is different. This happened to Richard Madden with Bodyguard, in August last year. He played the tight-mouthed, tight-muscled David Budd, personal minder to Keeley Hawes’ home secretary, Julia Montague, in Jed Mercurio’s six-part BBC One thriller, and the country went bananas.
Bodyguard was great TV – gripping, unpredictable, sexy, with a madly OTT finale – but nobody could have predicted the furore it would cause. It was a national event, achieving the BBC’s largest drama audience for a decade. Social media was aflame every Sunday, with much of the heat centred on Madden, his good looks and his stoic “Ma’ams”. There were threads devoted to his eyebrows, as well as other parts of his anatomy. By the final episode, he had been upgraded from “ex-Game Of Thrones guy” (he played Robb Stark for the first three series) to potential James Bond.
Yet all this hype and bluster happened while Madden was busy doing something else. That something was Rocketman, the Elton John biopic. Madden plays John Reid, Elton’s first manager and one-time lover, and the script required him to sing and dance, neither of which are part of his natural skill set. So while Bodyguard was on, he was getting up to jazz-hands standard, while wearing a pair of 70s Cuban heels. “I loved those heels, in the end,” he says when we meet. “A double-breasted suit and a big Cuban heel. I felt pretty sharp. They gave me a bit of a wiggle.”
Madden knew that Bodyguard was doing well only because his mum kept sending him pictures of newspapers and magazines. “Like, ‘You’re on the cover of this one, and this one, and this one,’” he says cheerfully (his natural accent is Bodyguard Scottish, not GoT English). “It was nice, but it was also, ‘Please stop sending me this because it freaks me the eff out.’”
Six months on, his schedule is choreographed down to the minute. “That sudden loss of time,” he says. “Everything runs away with you. I’ve been really busy, yet there’s still more demand. You run with it, but it’s like, OK, we’re doing press for Bodyguard in America, and now we’re doing press for awards stuff, and then there’s the actual awards, and then more and more. And everything rolls into each other, so then you haven’t been in your house for two months.”
