Photoshoots & Portraits > Session 070

W MAGAZINE – Perhaps no one has had a more famous on-screen death than Richard Madden. We are talking, of course, about the Red Wedding, the iconic season three episode of Game of Thrones, in which Madden’s Robb Stark—then, still a main character of the series—meets his untimely fate, alongside his new bride and mother, in a very bloody and very memorable end. “I think it’s going to be my favorite death,” Madden said. “Full of arrows, and then you know, you get your heart stopped, and then they cut your head off. It’s all fun and games isn’t it, just covered in fake blood and limbs hanging off. Then the fake blood take a while to get off and you’ve kind of got stained red for a while.” Rest assured, Madden soon made his return to the silver screen, as the leading man in Netflix’s Bodyguard, a role for which he took home the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Series. Here, the actor talks about his on-screen fates, his first kiss, and his crush on Cameron Diaz.

What was the first thing you ever auditioned for?

My first part that I ever did actually was when I was eleven years old. I did a film called Complicity where I played a boy that gets raped and then kills his raper. I think when you’re eleven years old and you’re experiencing or acting in something that’s a sexual violence because you don’t fully comprehend sex, you don’t understand the violence of that. I’m thankful I didn’t understand so much because I think that would’ve been more traumatic to deal with.

Have you watched it recently?

I’ve not actually watched it since I was that age and remember I had to wait until it came out on DVD because it was an eighteen-plus so I couldn’t watch it because I was only twelve years old.

How did Bodyguard come to you?

The Bodyguard script arrived through Jed Mercurio who’s the writer and director I’d work with years before on adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He sent me this script and asked me if I wanted to play this. This character, which I instantly fell in love with his complicated, morally ambiguous years, and [going] between the good and bad and not knowing whether if he’s either one of those.

The ending was very powerful.

There’s a couple of huge sequences that are hugely anxiety making for the audience and the actor playing the part, which it was at the time. They are quite difficult to shoot because it’s such a prolonged period you have to keep yourself in this high adrenaline, high anxiety state and even when you go home at night and you got eight hours until you go back to work the next day, you can’t drop it because it takes so much energy to summon yourself into that place that you go into standby mode and then you jump back into it again. By the end I was completely exhausted but it’s worth it.

You’ve died quite a few times on screen.

I love a good death and I’ve had a few really good deaths in my time. I think Games of Thrones and the Red Wedding was a pretty good one. I think it’s going to be my favorite death. Full of arrows, and then you know, you get your heart stopped, and then they cut your head off. It’s all fun and games isn’t it, just covered in fake blood and limbs hanging off. Then the fake blood take a while to get off and you’ve kind of got stained red for a while. That was the last Game of Thrones scene I shot, it was the last day on set for the whole crew, and it was the end of my journey for Game of Thrones so emotionally you had everything that was going on with the character, and then yourself where you’re saying, “Okay this is my death on the show and my death with this family and this crew that I’m with.”

Then you played Romeo, who dies also, twice.

I’ve done that twice, at twenty-one and thirty. I think I’ll never play Romeo again. And I did a World War One thing a few years ago and got shot in the head in that one. That was a good death.

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