Sean bean dying tv#
More recently he has switched between action-led TV dramas (Missing, Legends and The Frankenstein Chronicles) and darker fare, most notably cross-dressing teacher Simon Gaskell in McGovern’s earlier drama, Accused (a role he won an International Emmy for). His Ned Stark was both weary commander and good man fatally out of his depth a lesser actor might have struggled to sell the often naive decisions that sealed Ned’s fate, but Bean’s authority and ability to say more with one frustrated look than a thousand speeches is what kept fans rooting for him to the bitter end. Games of Thrones was also the show that reminded people that behind the menace lurked an actor of great subtlety. It was Game of Thrones that cemented his reputation for dying well. Lord of the Rings made him the doomed anti-hero, he was easily the best thing in the disastrous Troy, giving Odysseus guile, wit and that familiar, rough-edged charm, and he terrified TV viewers as property developer John Dawson in the dark and brilliant Red Riding. He sneered at Pierce Brosnan’s Bond in GoldenEye, shouted at Nicolas Cage in National Treasure and threatened Harrison Ford in Patriot Games. After an early triumph as a British TV heartthrob playing Mellors in Ken Russell’s Lady Chatterley and steely rifleman Richard Sharpe – a role that stirred a generation’s loins – he built a Hollywood career out of playing villains. The man who played Sharpe, Boromir and Ned Stark with such swagger is Rada-trained and Royal Shakespeare Company-finished. Yet those deaths, and the memes and jokes they’ve inspired, have obscured Bean’s acting prowess. Sword-swinger … Bean as Ned Stark in Game of Thrones. He’s been shot, stabbed, pulled apart by horses, chased off a cliff by cows, thrown off a giant satellite dish, blown up, beheaded and turned into a human pin-cushion by Orc arrows. It is not the most obvious of roles for Bean, now 58, who built a name for himself as a swashbuckler and sword-swinger, famous mostly for his many glorious on-screen deaths.
As a study of loneliness it is thoughtful, subtle and ultimately mesmerising: a picture of a man on the verge of breakdown who is holding himself together through sheer faith and a desperate desire to atone. Throughout it all Bean slowly, carefully builds up a portrait of a man who is both a part of this community and yet somehow apart from it, who gives freely of himself yet sits alone at the local bar, donning his sadness just as he puts on his chasuble for mass. We cheer as he attempts to rally his sparse congregation with a controversial attack on the “old men” who run the Catholic church and their “contempt for the bodies of women”, and smile as he goofily sings his sick mother to sleep with a full-throated rendition of Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo. Thus we watch transfixed as Father Michael acts almost more as social worker than priest, trying to solve problems that are beyond prayer. He commands the screen even when silent, his pain flitting across that gaunt, ravaged face … Sean Bean in Broken.
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