Richard Madden has powered through lockdown with a raft of new film, TV and podcasting projects, with a lead role in Chloé Zhao’s Marvel movie, Eternals, front and centre. It’s a superhero film like nothing you’ve seen before, says Madden…
BRITISH GQ: Richard Madden isn’t in the habit of sitting around doing nothing. Earlier this year, Madden found himself quarantining in an LA hotel room ahead of reshoots for his upcoming Marvel vehicle Eternals. Naturally, it was boring. Some actors would have sat around living off room service for ten days and bingeing TV; others might have ignored the quarantine rules entirely only to find themselves shamed on the front pages of gossip sites and industry magazines. But not Madden. “I kind of have a guilt if I’ve got time to be doing something and I’m not,” explains Madden.
Rather than sitting around doing nothing, he had recording equipment sent to his room and began putting in eight-hour shifts recording a sci-fi podcast series called From Now, playing the only survivor of a lost space mission that returns, unexpectedly, to earth 35 years after it left. His fellow Scot Brian Cox, recently of Succession fame but also an eminent actor in his own right, voiced Madden’s brother in the series; Cox laid down his parts from New York and the two occasionally worked together over FaceTime. “Sometimes we had to stop because the cleaners were vacuuming in the hall,” Madden recalls, “and there’s no vacuuming in space.”
