Welcome to Richard Madden Fan, a fansite dedicated to Richard Madden, Scottish stage, film, and television actor known for portraying Robb Stark in Game of Thrones, Prince Kit in Disney's Cinderella, David Budd in Bodyguard, and most recently, Ikaris in Marvel's Eternals. Please enjoy our site and our gallery with over 35k high quality images.

"I just think of myself as an upstart who is trying to get better at what I do."
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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.”

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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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PTSD “is something that people live with everyday,” the actor said. “It can be a really trickling level of anxiety you constantly live with, or paranoia, or panic attacks.”

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER – Golden Globe-winning star of Bodyguard, Richard Madden, told The Hollywood Reporter’s Drama Actor Roundtable he found himself “physically and mentally exhausted” at the end of filming the BBC series. “I need to stop. I need to stop doing this for a while,” Madden thought, after playing a veteran suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

“It weighed very heavy on me,” the actor told the roundtable. “You spend more time in someone else’s clothes, saying someone else’s words, thinking someone else’s thoughts. You do lose a bit of yourself.”

“I’m not a method actor in any way, but you get a huge hangover from this,” he continued. “At the end of this, I felt very isolated and broken, much like the character was.”

To prepare for the role, Madden “spoke to a few soldiers,” but confessed it was “tough, because they really don’t want to talk about it. People don’t want to discuss this at all.”

PTSD “is something that people live with everyday,” said the Scottish actor and former Game of Thrones star. “It can be a really trickling level of anxiety you constantly live with, or paranoia, or panic attacks.” Madden said his goal as an actor was “to humanize [PTSD] within someone who is in complete denial about it.”

Madden joined Hugh Grant, Diego Luna, Sam Rockwell, Stephan James and Billy Porter for the Drama Actor Roundtable. The full roundtable is set to air July 14 on SundanceTV. Follow all the Emmy season roundtables at THR.com/Roundtables.



Photoshoots & Portraits > Session 066

Magazine Scans  > Vogue (May 2019)

 

VOGUE – Halfway through our interview, Richard Madden discloses that he didn’t have sex until he was 18. “Eighteen!” he exclaims, as if that’s ancient. “I was the fat boy: 38in waist. I’m a 31 to 32in now, so add another seven inches…” he draws my attention to his crunched midriff. At school he was shy, and taunted in the playground. At one point he even thought, “If I get beaten up it will end” – and so scheduled a lunchtime fight with his tormentors. “And then my mum drove by and saved me. I love my mum for that.”

This “big potato”, as he describes himself, is hard to square with the 32-year-old man sitting with me now, ripped and vacuum-sealed into a navy polo shirt and jeans; blue eyes, thick brows, jaw as sharp as a bowler’s elbow. On screen he’s brooding, melancholic: everything you’d expect from a west coast, working-class Scot from Elderslie, the birthplace of William Wallace (also known as Braveheart). But his accent doesn’t have the volatile edge of fellow actor David Tennant’s, raised up the road in Ralston, nor the casual rolling confidence of Gerard Butler’s, from nearby Paisley. It’s like a lawnmower on moss – a sweet flat purr.

And he’s still boyish enough to giggle at the enormous pink bed headboard in the Soho hotel room where we meet, and to bounce briefly on the sofa and find it too soft – Goldilocks style. He settles instead in a stiff velour tub chair opposite my own, flipping one leg over the low-slung arm. Is he comfortable being the hottest man in film right now? He says he’s “flattered”, but I sense deep down he’s baffled that his taut buttocks drew record audiences to Bodyguard, the BBC thriller for which he won Best Actor in the 2019 Golden Globes. His torso spawned a thousand memes after Game of Thrones and he’s been cast as every romantic cliché – smouldering in a smock in Medici: Masters of Florence, simmering with a scythe as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He’s played Romeo twice (“I love that character, although I am happy to leave him alone for a while”), even Prince Charming in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella.

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There’s out of work, and then there’s out of work. Thanks to the success of ‘Bodyguard’, Richard Madden is enjoying the good kind, kicking back with the world at his feet

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.’

 

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Bodyguard made him a star – but he hasn’t always been comfortable as the lead. He talks about bullies, his inner ‘fat lad’ and new Elton John biopic Rocketman

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.”

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Photoshoots & Portraits > Session 056

Magazine Scans > Elle (May 2019)

 

ELLE – Richard Madden is giddy at the prospect of going dark. Hunched attractively in a leather chair at a Beverly Hills hotel, the 32-year-old Scotsman, known for playing doomed scion Robb Stark on Game of Thrones and the trauma-stricken David Budd on the BBC’s Bodyguard, is eager to shed his broken-good-guy image. “I really enjoyed being a bastard,” he says, punching his right fist in his left hand like a ball in a mitt. He’s referring to his role as John Reid, the rebrand manager and former lover of Elton John (played by Taron Egerton) in this month’s fantastical and much-anticipated Rocketman biopic. “He just loved fighting people,” Madden says. Reid also had moments of charm and generosity, the actor acknowledges, but his manipulative side was much more fun to play.

In person, the actor is a riveting combination of flinty and safe. He looks like the guy to trust in a crowd, but then his nerves seem spring-loaded, like when he catches a bottle top falling off the table like it’s a grenade. We talk about getting a beer but order sparkling water instead because it’s early in the afternoon and pouring rain and, well, that combination can make for a booze-soaked slippery slope—especially in London, where Madden’s lived for 14 years. “There, it’s dark by 3 p.m. and it’s raining and miserable and you go, ‘I just want to sit by the fire with a bottle of red wine in the pub,’ ” he says, slipping into an almost incomprehensible back-and-forth Scottish brogue: “ ‘Eh, we’re shot.’ And you’re like, ‘Well, I’ll have another one.’ ” Pause. “ ‘So, are you shot or not shot? All right, cool, I’ll have another one.’ ”

Madden will abandon his beloved London for Los Angeles next month, but he still hasn’t secured a job or a place to live. Also, he’s single, maybe. A few days ago, the British press crowed about the actress Ellie Bamber breaking up with him, but he shuts down all talk of his love life. Don’t ask him about rumors that he’s the next Bond, either. “It’s all just noise,” says the actor, a pleasant aftereffect of his success in the title role in Bodyguard, the BBC’s most-watched drama since the season finales of Downton Abbey, for which he recently won a Golden Globe for Best Actor. “By March, there will be another British TV show with another young male actor, and then he’ll be the next James Bond for the following two months.”

Things might be a bit up in the air, but Madden is loving it. “I feel quite free at the moment,” he says, like any man worth his scruffy beard. “If I’m going to be reading scripts for two months, I’d rather sit by the pool than sit in a pub in East London.” Plus, he’s got some great friends in L.A., like Elton John, who whisked him off to his concert in Sacramento last night, and fellow Iron Throne heir Sophie Turner, whom he’s going to try to meet up with tonight. “It’s quite nice because we were so close when we were kids, and then we went off and did other things but reconnected as adults,” he says of Turner and other GoT costars like Kit Harington, Gwendoline Christie, and Maisie Williams. While some of his pals are still going strong on the show, he has a no-spoilers policy: “I have to be like, ‘Just let me watch it.’ ” He does, however, have a Season 8 prediction with regard to Turner’s character, Sansa Stark. “People thought she was weak and wilty,” he says, “but she’s our mother’s daughter, you know….” Since getting offed in the infamous Red Wedding scene, Madden has enjoyed watching as a fan. “It’s weird because they talk about Robb Stark, and I don’t associate myself with it anymore,” he says. “But then I remember, ‘Oh, that’s me, I played that part.’ ”

In preparation for Rocketman, Madden spoke with a number of Elton John’s and Reid’s friends. Donatella Versace, in particular, helped Madden get a better grasp of his character’s righteous zeal. “She said, ‘The thing about John Reid was that he was never wrong.’ ” And even as the relationship deteriorated (Elton John cut ties with Reid’s management company in 1998 and later settled financial disputes out of court; Reid has since retired from music management and lives in Australia), the two men shared an intimate bond. Madden and Egerton re-create that dynamic—sometimes clad in ’70s-style double-breasted suits and stacked Cuban heels, other times naked. When asked about Rocketman’s much-hyped sex scenes, Madden shakes his head and says, “I dread doing these things.” But, to him, the differences between male and female costars are negligible. “With one you get stubble rash, right?” he says. “That’s basically it. Otherwise, there’s no difference. It’s storytelling.”

Clearly, he’s a good guy at heart, though his whole body rejects the idea that he’s anything like his most famous characters. “It’s incredible to think about me in one of them,” he says with a shiver. “I don’t like it one bit!” But whether he wants to be or not, he’s bound to the code. “I suppose there’s a thing with a lot of these characters I play—to do the right thing, to look after people,” Madden says, taking a swig of sparkling water. “I suppose that is something.”



 

NY TIMES – After three seasons as Robb Stark in “Game of Thrones,” Richard Madden thought he knew a thing or two about television blockbusters. Then the British thriller “Bodyguard” came along and blew his mind.

Written by Jed Mercurio (“Line of Duty”), “Bodyguard” stars Madden as David Budd, a PTSD-afflicted Afghanistan war veteran assigned to protect the home secretary, Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes), whose hawkish politics he loathes — and icy allure he can’t resist.

When it debuted in late August, the numbers were staggering: According to the BBC, 41 million (and counting) watched the six-episode set, making “Bodyguard” the highest-rated drama since “Downton Abbey.” Then in October, “Bodyguard” moved to Netflix and was widely binged, leading to Golden Globe nominations for both Madden and the series, in the best television drama category.

“People asked me, ‘Did you know it was going to do so well?’ And no, I didn’t have a clue because it was about surviving quite a grueling shoot,” Madden said. “And to think this little British TV show that we all worked really hard on had such an impact is a bit overwhelming for me. I think one in four people in Britain watched it, which is crazy.”

It also solidified Madden, a 32-year-old Scotsman, as leading-man material and cast him as a front-runner to replace Daniel Craig as the next James Bond. Make what you will of reports that he favors a vodka martini. But if Madden knows anything, he’s not saying.

In a phone interview from Los Angeles as he prepared for awards season, he talked about the alchemy of “Bodyguard” and keeping his cool under the paparazzi’s glare. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Those ratings! What was the magic formula?

I wish I knew because I could recreate it on every job I did. [Laughs] It’s something to do with this gray zone that we all live in, this moral ambiguity. Things can sometimes be so clean-cut in who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy. And this straddled the lines of both, and played with the audience’s perception.

Then there’s Budd’s steamy relationship with his powerful boss. I understand that’s not such a far-fetched story line.

Actually, we worked closely with a lot of men who had been in that position — looking after foreign dignitaries and members of Parliament and royalty — and said, without naming names, that these bonds do get made and the lines do get very crossed. Because this person that you live with all the time, you see them a lot more than you do your own family, and you go through extreme situations. And thus, that kind of intimacy does happen.

What was so grueling about the shoot?

It was six-day weeks, and we were filming 14 hours a day, and the camera was always on my character. And I had this bulletproof vest on the whole time, and that’s physically uncomfortable. But it was more down to the mentality of someone who’s struggling very much with mental health issues while trying to keep his life together.

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