Public Appearances > 2019 > Jun 17: -Giorgio Armani Fashion Show Spring/Summer – Milan
Press: Richard Madden Talks End of ‘Bodyguard’: “I Felt Very Isolated and Broken — Much Like the Character”
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.
Press: Richard Madden On Potentially Playing Second Fiddle To A Female Bond
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.
Press: ‘Sharp Objects,’ ‘Barry’ and ‘Bodyguard’ Among Rockie Awards Winners
The Banff World Media Festival on Monday unveiled the international winners of its Rockie Awards, which continued a traditional shootout between American and British TV producers in the Canadian Rockies.
BBC’s Bodyguard thriller was tapped as best drama, while HBO’s Barry took home the best comedy crown and BBC’s Doctor Who won for best sci-fi and genre-based series.
Elsewhere, HBO’s Sharp Objects won the prize for best limited series, while VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race won for best reality series. Also on the comedy front, IFC Films and CBC’s Baroness von Sketch Show collected the Rockie for best comedy and variety program.
The Rockie Awards, for which U.S. TV shows compete against international fare, also gave Baroness von Sketch Show the Rogers Prize for Excellence in Canadian Content.
In all, U.S. producers picked up nine Rockie Awards, followed by U.K. producers with eight and Canadian producers with seven.
The Banff World Media Festival will continue through Wednesday.
Press: Richard Madden had his big break. Now what?
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.’
