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.”
It’s typical dedication from an actor who, since his breakout as the doomed rebel king Robb Stark in HBO’s Game Of Thrones back in 2011, has racked up TV and film credits with gusto. There was, of course, Bodyguard, Jed Mercurio’s 2018 thriller about a personal protection officer trying to preserve the life of a controversial government minister – later, his lover – played by Keeley Hawes (“I’m just riding the wave,” Madden told GQ at the time, coolly shrugging off his Golden Globe win for the show and the 17 million Brits who tuned into its finale). Then, in 2019, there was Sam Mendes’ triple-Oscar-winning 1917, in which Madden played the older brother and fellow First World War soldier of lead Dean-Charles Chapman. And the same year Madden took on the role of John Reid, the ambitious, cruel and utterly chic manager to Taron Egerton’s Elton John in the acclaimed Rocketman.
Madden’s efforts in the hotel room have paid off: From Now is currently being developed into a TV series for Amazon, which he is co-producing, but it’s just one of a number of projects he has coming up. He’s finished those Eternals reshoots and is anticipating the film’s release this November (but more on that later) and has even launched a perfume, Defy, with Calvin Klein this month. (“Luckily, I like the smell of it, so that’s good! That makes my life easier.”) It’s an apt partnership given Madden likes to wear different aftershaves while playing different characters, the idea being that particularly reactive scene partners – like Cox, perhaps, were he not 2,500 miles away for the recording of From Now – can pick up on more subtle facets of the characters Madden plays
“I imagine John Reid to be kind of over-perfumed, [with] really heavy notes,” says Madden, “and Robb Stark would be more like an earthy, grounded smell. I think he’d probably just smell like sweat and mud…” And ale, maybe? “Ale! That might be surprisingly popular. They’re probably developing that as we speak. That’ll be the next thing.”
The would-be smell of his character in Eternals is among the many aspects of Madden’s upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe debut that he can’t reveal, and perhaps that’s for the best, but certain details have emerged about the film that he can acknowledge. Madden plays Ikaris, a millennia-old “Eternal”, an alien superhero with the powers of flight, super strength, heat vision and teleportation, among other talents, who was created in the distant past by an ancient race known as the Celestials. Opposite Ikaris at the heart of the film is Gemma Chan’s Sersi, a fellow Eternal with whom he has what Madden describes as “a through-the-ages love story”. Along with a handful of other Eternals, Sersi and Ikaris team up to defend the world from Deviants, essentially their own evil counterparts who were also created by the Celestials.
Since it was announced in April 2018, Eternals has been one of Marvel’s most voraciously anticipated films among fans, not least because of the fact that it’s both written and directed by Chloé Zhao, last year’s double Oscar winner for Nomadland. Zhao’s film, the logic goes, could be another bold entry into the MCU, like Taika Waititi’s neon-infused acid trip Thor: Ragnarok, and together the two might represent a new era for superhero films where studio executives, usually too nervous about the bottom line to allow directors total creative control over their films, are a little more relaxed about taking creative risks on their billion-dollar-plus projects.
Shooting on the film wrapped in January 2021 but, as Madden mentions, reshoots and additional dialogue sessions have been ongoing, leading to all sorts of dilemmas (“Do I still fit into that skintight superhero outfit after lockdown?”). On the one hand, Madden has put in the hours doing the usual MCU stuff: fighting what he calls “a duvet on a huge rubber ball” and confronting cardboard cut-outs of monsters held aloft by crew members on set as though they were deadly enemies, and presumably Deviants. “Or lots of laser eyes, like that” – he squints dramatically – “cos I’ve got laser eyes.” But, he insists, the fact that the core central cast of Eternals is made up of ancient beings who have seen, done and experienced everything under the sun in their aeon-spanning lifetimes has elevated Zhao’s film “above just another superhero movie. It’s about, ‘OK, so how do they interact with the world now, when they’ve done everything?’” he continues. “What are these people like? And what do they value and care about? What doesn’t affect them?”
The world has seen superhero films done straight, Madden says, and is now ready for something fresh. He points to the popularity of Amazon Prime’s The Boys, the ultra-dark series in which genetically enhanced, sometimes immortal “superheroes” are shown to be deeply flawed, narcissistic people behind their carefully managed public personas. “We’ve done that classic thing,” says Madden, so it’s now about how do we make it more interesting? I’m hoping we have done that with Eternals. The Marvel Universe keeps changing and elevating and growing and I really think we’re doing something that they’ve not done yet.”
Eternals is out on 5 November.
