And a new poster!

And a new poster!
EW – Saturday night’s alright for fighting…and so, apparently, is any other night (or day) when it comes to the contentious professional and romantic relationship between Elton John (Taron Egerton) and his manager John Reid (Richard Madden).
Rocketman chronicles Elton John’s rise to fame from his early days as a childhood piano-playing prodigy to the peak of his fame in the 1970s and ’80s and his descent into a drug-fueled haze. The film also gave fans a glimpse into John’s fraught love life, including a toxic relationship with his manager John Reid.
In this exclusive deleted clip, tensions mount once again between the pair as they continue to fight over what’s best for Elton’s career — here, it’s whether or not to disclose his sexuality to his mother, a figure who has been a nearly lifelong source of angst for the rock star. As Elton prepares for a show, Reid corners him about coming out to his mother, even threatening to tell her himself.
“What I love about our scenes in the film is that they are two massive personalities,” Egerton previously told EW about sharing the screen with Madden. “It’s a bit like an unstoppable force and an immovable object and a lot of the conflict in the film lies there. We had great scenes to play with.” Including some that didn’t make the final cut, as seen here.
Though they’d never met before filming, Egerton and Madden became fast friends working together on Rocketman and their friendship has proved a fan favorite ever since, with the pair adorably reuniting at EW’s Comic-Con party last month.
While promoting the film, Egerton and Madden told EW they were highly anticipating the DVD bonus features, including a cut portion of their “Honky Cat” musical number. “It’s very cheeky and naughty and we had a lot of fun with it despite the logistical challenges,” said Egerton. “Richard was better at it than I was. There’s a sequence that’s cut actually, which is slightly heartbreaking because a lot of work went into it.”
The Digital, 4k Ultra HD, and Blu-ray releases boast over 75 minutes of bonus content, most notably four extended musical sequences and 10 deleted/extended scenes, including the one exclusively featured here. Other features include sing-along tracks of 13 songs; interviews with Elton John, the cast, and filmmakers; footage from recording studio sessions, as well as three featurettes exclusive to the digital release.
Watch the clip above for more. Rocketman is available on digital beginning August 6.
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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Public Appearances > 2019 > Jul 21: San Diego Comic Con – Marvel Studios Panel for Eternals
Public Appearances > 2019 > Jul 21: San Diego Comic Con – Marvel Studios Press for Eternals
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.
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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.”
BRITISH GQ – What makes a good James Bond? British? Of course. Scottish? Even better. Can he play brutish but vulnerable? It worked for the last one. Does he look sharp in a tux? See above. But what about a wry, natural humour? Because we haven’t seen that for a while. And yet far from the troubled action man he built for Bodyguard – and even further from the princes and pretty boys that was almost his typecast – it’s his knowing wit and bone-dry quips that explain why Richard Madden is odds-on to make Double-O status. Oh, and guess what? He even drinks Vodka Martinis
Our January/ February cover star, Richard Madden is the man of the moment. From Game of Thrones, through to hit BBC drama Bodyguard and of course, those James Bond rumours. Read an exclusive extract from the interview and download to read the full interview now on digital edition.
Richard Madden lets out a groan when he clocks the question that’s coming.
So, I begin, the Mail On Sunday reported last week that you’re set to be offered…
And that’s when I hear it: the pained expression of the young British actor being forced to talk about speculation that they might be the next James Bond – a sort of hazing initiation for those who’ve done the Donmar.
“My first reaction,” says Madden, “is always the same reaction, which is the papers make up a story on a Sunday so they can discredit that story on the Monday so they can sell papers on both days.”
Sure, I say, but at the same time, the bookies aren’t making Jonah Hill the current favourite to be Britain’s favourite super spy, are they?
“They aren’t, no, but this is what happens with all these shows, like Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager. Then there’s the next one. I’m the next one. Everyone just loves the rumour mill on that topic. I’m just the current one. There’ll be a different one next week.”
All of which is pretty hard to argue with. But still, I say, nice to be mentioned all the same.
“Lovely. I’m more than flattered to be mentioned, for people to consider putting me in that role. I’m very flattered and thankful. It’s a really brilliant thing to be in.”
Just for the record, then, you wouldn’t rule it out?
“I don’t want to curse anything by saying anything. I think that’s the curse of that. If you talk about it, you’ll curse it.”
He will admit, however, that he is a big Bond fan.
“Yeah. I love the movies. I’ve read all the books.”
You’ve read all the books?
“Yeah.”
Download to read the full Jan/Feb issue with Richard Madden now
Netflix star tells TheWrap he’d like to see a much more relaxed David Budd if story continues
(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Netflix’s “Bodyguard” through the finale.)
I put the article behind a cut because of the spoilers