Sean Bean, star of Game of Thrones season 1, only just found out how Game of Thrones ends, because of course he did. The actor, who played doomed patriarch Ned Stark, revealed he hadn’t bothered to keep up with the events of the show after his character was killed off at the end of season 1.
The hit HBO series ended in May 2019 after eight seasons – *spoilers* years of fighting, blood, and dragon fire, saw the leaders of Westeros choose Bran Stark, Ned’s youngest son, as King, while also granting independence to the North (AKA the Starks ancestral home). Ned’s oldest daughter, Sansa, is named Queen in the North – things work out pretty well for the surviving members of a family plagued by bad luck (to put it lightly) throughout the series.
However, when asked by The Times if he’d seen the final episode of the show, Bean replied: “No. What happened?” Journalist Ed Potton was reluctant to answer, suggesting that Bean may want to watch it eventually. “I’ll have forgotten by then,” he replied. “Go on.” And his reaction to finally finding out the events of the finale? “So did Winterfell stay separate? Oh, good for them.”
Since Game of Thrones, Bean has starred in Snowpiercer, the Netflix small-screen adaptation of Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 movie of the same name, as well as appearing in movies like The Martian, Jupiter Ascending, and the Oscar-nominated animated flick Wolfwalkers.
He’s no stranger to fantasy franchises, either – prior to Thrones, he played Boromir in the Lord of the Rings movies. When comparing the roles of Ned and Boromir, he said Ned was a little easier as there was less homework required – Tolkien built an extremely rich and complex world, after all. “Yeah, it was a much earthier role,” Bean told The Times. “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.”
If (unlike Mr. Bean) you’ve already seen Game of Thrones, fill out your watch list with our picks of the best TV shows of 2020 while we wait for House of the Dragon to arrive on HBO.
