Photoshoots > Session 055
THE JACKAL – This is not how it should be. Richard Madden, gingerbread-haired and always smouldering, is sitting in the basement of a working men’s club in south-east London, relishing the fact he has absolutely nothing to do. Not now, at least. Tomorrow, the Glaswegian actor is presenting a BAFTA award with his Rocketman co-stars Taron Egerton and Jamie Bell, but he’s so relaxed about it he doesn’t even know the category yet (Special Visual Effects), or the nominees (it goes to Black Panther). The most pressing thing he needs to do today, ahead of an upcoming trip back to the US, is go to his house and locate his razor.
This is not how it should be. Not for the man who played Robb Stark, Game of Thrones’ tragic demi-protagonist whose death at the Red Wedding in 2013 became the TV event of the decade/century/millennium. Once his father, Ned Stark (Sean Bean), lost his head early on in the show’s run, everyone thought Robb Stark would be the new leading man. Maybe it was his hair, tousled and luscious; maybe it was his princely jawline, or his unwavering moral compass. He looked good riding a horse, was that it? This is what a leading man consists of, everyone said. Then he was murdered.
This is not how it should be. Not for the man who played David Budd, central figure in Jed Mercurio’s Bodyguard, the six-part series that brought the country together in an age where we’ve never had more things to watch on TV. It was the biggest Sunday-night drama since Downton Abbey; when a British tabloid ran a spoiler on the front page, the country was up in arms. The show’s distribution in the US on Netflix boosted its profile even further – and Madden
won a Golden Globe. Someone, somewhere whispered Bond and suddenly everyone frothed at the mouth because, of course! To put it another way, it takes him so long to leave the working men’s club, with the pictures, and the adoration, and the swarm of well-wishing locals, that the Bodyguard star may soon need a bodyguard.
‘I had to learn to get over waiting for it to all go to shit.’
