The “Thrones” finale led to infamous outrage, but Bean is pretty happy about where the Stark children ended up.
HBO
It’s been over two years since “Game of Thrones” ended its run on HBO, but Sean Bean is only now finding out about how the story ends. The actor played Ned Stark during the first season of “Thrones,” and it was Ned’s shocking death in the penultimate episode of the season that first propelled “Thrones” to viral status. After Ned exited the series, Bean stopped paying attention to “Thrones.” Cut to a recently-published interview in The Times of London and Bean finally got to find out how “Thrones” ended, and he’s pretty happy about it from a Stark perspective.
Per The Times (via The Playlist): “I have a silly question about whether the end of ‘Game of Thrones,’ when the Starks’ inward-looking kingdom secedes from the rest of the continent, had any parallels with Brexit. It’s wasted on Bean. As is his unbothered way, he didn’t keep up with the show after Ned had his head chopped off at the end of season one. So he hasn’t seen the final episode? ‘No. What happened?’ Does he really want to know? Surely he may watch it one day. ‘I’ll have forgotten by then, go on.’ I describe how Ned’s son becomes king of Westeros and his daughter queen of the North. ‘So did Winterfell stay separate? Oh, good for them,’ he says with grandfatherly vagueness.”
While Bean is interested in the characters he plays, he’s mostly uninterested in all the franchise world-building that accompanies playing Ned Stark in “Game of Thrones” or Boromir in “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.” Bean did tell The Times that Ned proved a bit easier on him as an actor than Boromir, if only because the former didn’t require him to have an education in all things Tolkien.
“Yeah, it was a much earthier role,” Bean said when comparing Ned to Boromir. “Also, we established that we would work on an accent that was similar to mine [for Ned]. So that also gave it that extra weight.”
Bean most recently had a voice role in the acclaimed Apple TV+ animated movie “Wolfwalkers,” and he joined the TNT adaptation of “Snowpiercer” in its second season as the villainous Mr. Wilford. Head over to The Times’ website to read Bean’s latest profile in its entirety.
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