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.
