Richard Madden knows this now, though he didn’t in January, when the Scottish actor found himself seated next to Moore at the Golden Globes. Madden had received his first Globe nomination for playing a British politician’s PTSD-stricken protection officer in the hit mini-series “Bodyguard,” and before the names in his category were read, Moore leaned over to strategize.

“She was like, ‘O.K., sweetie, if you win, do you want to come out behind me or do you want to go around the other way?’” Madden recalled. He responded incredulously: Of course he wouldn’t win.

But he did. And as the orchestra began to play, Madden had no idea where to go. With a professional’s ease, Moore stood up, stepped back and coaxed Madden past her to the stage. “And then when I came back to the table after,” he said, “she was like, “I asked you which way you wanted to go!’”

When it comes to navigating his path through Hollywood, the 32-year-old Madden prefers to figure it out on the fly. This week, you can catch him in the musical “Rocketman,” where Madden plays a cunning music manager whose seduction of Elton John extends past the boardroom and into the bedroom. It’s a far cry from Madden’s best-known role as Robb Stark, the virtuous, doomed “Game of Thrones” character who perished during the show’s notorious “Red Wedding” episode.

That series only got bigger and bigger as it went on, but after his third-season exit, Madden was no longer around to partake in the spoils. Still, being killed off early has its benefits: It let Madden gradually age out of callow-prince roles and start playing complicated adult men. His role on “Bodyguard” last fall served as a reintroduction of sorts, a signal to the industry that Madden’s matinee-idol looks had grown gratifyingly flinty. Even his vulnerability now seemed dangerous.

“I’m so used to playing the good guy that bad things happen to,” Madden told me in a Cannes hotel room this month, just days after “Rocketman” premiered at the film festival there. Initially tired from a day of doing press, Madden became warmer and more animated as he spoke, his blue eyes widening often for emphasis. “I was interested in playing a slightly darker character, with different motivations to him.”

His “Rocketman” role, John Reid, lets Madden play the Machiavellian type with a jolt of sexual electricity: When Reid tells the young, untested Elton John, “You’re so humble, it’s embarrassing,” Madden makes his taunt sound like a come-on.
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I’m sorry for the lack of updates. I took a short break from fansites and it ended up being a long hiatus. I’ll be updating the photoshoots tomorrow but here are the events that Richard has been to this year. It’s been a very busy year for him so far!

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 5: The BAFTA Los Angeles Tea Party

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 6: 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards – Red Carpet

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 6: 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards – Fiji Water

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 6: 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards – Show

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 6: 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards – Press Room

Public Appearances > 2019 >  Jan 6: 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards – After Party

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 6: 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards – Netflix After Party

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 6: 76th Annual Golden Globe Awards – Moet & Chandon

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 13: The 24th Annual Critics’ Choice Awards

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 22: National Television Awards 2019 – Red Carpet

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 22: National Television Awards 2019 – Winner’s Room

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 27: 25th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards – Red Carpet

Public Appearances > 2019 > Jan 27: 25th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards – Show

Public Appearances > 2019 > Feb 10: EE British Academy Film Awards

Public Appearances > 2019 > Feb 13: BOSS Womenswear & Menswear – Backstage – New York Fashion Week

Public Appearances > 2019 > Apr 7: “Bodyguard” Screening & Reception

Public Appearances > 2019 > Apr 23: 2019 Time 100 Gala

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 6: The 2019 Met Gala Celebrating Camp: Notes on Fashion

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 9: Netflix’s “Bodyguard” Screening & Panel

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 16: “Rocketman” Photocall – The 72nd Annual Cannes Film Festival

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 16: “Rocketman” Red Carpet – The 72nd Annual Cannes Film Festival

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 16: “Rocketman” Cannes Gala Party – The 72nd Annual Cannes Film Festival

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 17: “Rocketman” Press Conference – The 72nd Annual Cannes Film Festival

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 17: Chopard Party – The 72nd Annual Cannes Film Festival

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 20: “Rocketman” UK Premiere – London

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 20: “Rocketman” Press Conference

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 23: ABC’s “Good Morning America”

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 23: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 29: “Rocketman” New York Premiere

Public Appearances > 2019 > May 29: The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Hosts An Official Screening Of “Rocketman”

TIME – Richard Madden has a rigor and a discipline in his work that makes him a very tough self-critic. In fact, he’s much tougher on himself than anyone else is. In him, this is an asset.

In Cinderella, he created a Prince of fine soul and sensibility. He found an English accent that he used offscreen and on for the entire duration of the shoot. It was a world away from his own Scottish brogue and Celtic being. He wanted no part of that in this spiritual aristocrat. But one thing I observed that Richard and the Prince did share was the heart of a gentleman.

Richard can certainly unleash wildness and ruthlessness when the role requires a charisma of danger. He was an electrifying Romeo when I directed him onstage in Romeo & Juliet. But he is also innately courtly and courteous, and mindful of others. This is a distinct part of his intense sex appeal, which combines those bedroom eyes with a romantic sensitivity. In Bodyguard, Richard’s intelligence and physicality worked at perfect pitch alongside his rigorous self-discipline. It paid off to frightening and moving effect.

I have no doubt that Richard will continue to shine, as a most dangerous gentleman of the silver screen.

Branagh is an Oscar-nominated director, actor and screenwriter

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.”