Sean Bean reveals he's started turning down roles in which his characters die after being killed onscreen a staggering 21 times
Sean Bean has revealed that he's so exasperated with his characters dying onscreen, he's now turning down roles which would see him meeting a grisly end.
The 60-year-old actor's character Ned Stark was brutally beheaded in the first season of hit fantasy drama Game Of Thrones, while Boromir perished under a shower of arrows in Lord Of The Rings — marking just two of his 21 screen deaths.
And Sean has now decided that he'd like for his next character to make it out of a TV show or movie alive, telling The Sun: 'I’ve turned down stuff. I’ve said, "They know my character’s going to die because I’m in it!"
'I just had to cut that out and start surviving, otherwise it was all a bit predictable. I did do one job and they said, "We’re going to kill you," and I was like, "Oh no!" and then they said, "Well, can we injure you badly?" and I was like, "OK, so long as I stay alive this time."
He added of his many screen roles: 'I’ve played a lot of baddies, they were great but they weren’t very fulfilling — and I always died.'
Fans of the star need not be concerned when they sit down to watch his upcoming BBC World War II drama World On Fire, as his character Douglas Bennett survives.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-7479843/Sean-Bean-turning-roles-characters-die-killed-onscreen-21-times.htmlSean Bean on becoming a war heroturned conscientious objector in BBC drama
The actor, 60, leads a glittering cast including Lesley Manville, Helen Hunt and Blake Harrison in the BBC’s new Sunday night wartime epic, World On Fire. Sean plays Douglas Bennett whose beautiful factory worker and jazz singer daughter Lois (Julia Brown) joins the Entertainments National Service Association and finds herself embroiled in a messy love triangle with a translator-turned-spy. Douglas has survived the horror of the First World War, but carries the scars of a mustard gas attack and battles PTSD, known then as shell shock.
After so many roles as a swashbuckling hero, Sean enjoyed the change of pace.
But he had one major caveat before he would sign up to do the show – he wanted writer Peter Bowker to guarantee his character would not die in series one.
During his long career, Sean has filmed some fantastic death scenes.
In GoldenEye he was splattered on a satellite dish, he was shot through the neck with a grappling hook in The Island, peppered with arrows in The Lord Of The Rings, and decapitated by his own sword in Game Of Thrones. Even in The Field he was trampled off a cliff by a herd of rampaging cows.
Sean laughs: “I had to check. I just said, what’s his story? Is he still around at the end? It is a bit of a joke but all those deaths were not in vain! They all meant something!
“But I did fall into that a little bit because the parts were interesting… they were all meaty, juicy roles and everybody likes to play a baddie and a villain, but I realised I was dying in everything and I just wanted to break out and survive!”
He continues: “I quite like that. Douglas is a strong man and he came back from war in pieces.
“He’s fractured, disturbed, damaged and it was interesting to portray a man who suffered so much psychological damage and physically too.”
Playing such a disturbed character did not come easily and Sean had to dredge up his own devastating experiences for the saddest scenes.
He says: “I try to find things in my life that were traumatic experiences. Without doing that you can’t really imagine how it must feel. It’s a personal pride thing, you have to dredge that up and it’s not always a pleasant experience
but it’s necessary to portray someone like Douglas truthfully.”
Sean based Douglas on his grandfather Harold who served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and came home a pacifist communist. Sean reveals: “My character is a conscientious objector and he doesn’t feel it’s a justifiable war in any sense. He thinks there should be diplomacy and dialogue, he doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight, he doesn’t know what is to come but he does know what happened to his life after the First World War. Why did they die in their hundreds and thousands? What were they fighting for? They were cannon fodder. Young men died or were killed and many came back broken and it was horrific and unnecessary. Douglas remembers men having their brains blown out and bloodshed. He’s suffering and he’s suffering greatly.”
Sean remembers his own grandfather Harold going through similar torment.
He continues: “My grandad was like that. He was a pacifist after his experiences in the war. My grandfather served in the Royal Navy and was sent up to Murmansk in north Russia near the Arctic for many years.
“I’ve got pictures of him and photographs and it affected him and he came back a shaken man. He got his mojo back in the years after but you could see it had an impact. It’s a long legacy.” The Second World War might have ended 15 years before Sean was born but it still loomed large in his childhood. He explained: “My mum and dad were kids up in Sheffield and they lived very close to the steel works. The steel industry was a target on occasions and they tell stories about gas masks and sirens and having to run and rationing.
“As kids we used to play in bomb craters, old buildings with walls missing. They’d be standing but one side would be missing and you could see all the different wallpapers in different houses in the rubble.”
Sean also drew on his experience of meeting real serving soldiers in the past during his time filming 19th century Peninsular War drama Sharpe in the Nineties.
He said: “When we did Sharpe there was a scene when there was an award for damaged soldiers in the Peninsular War. They had missing limbs and legs and they were men who had fought in the Falklands war and they were gracious enough to be involved in our series.
“Talking to them it wasn’t so much the physical side, as the mental side that affected them after the Falkland Islands. I think there have now been more who committed suicide than actually killed in battle themselves.”
World On Fire appealed to Sean partly because of its huge scale and great cast – but most importantly he was drawn by the quality of The A Word writer Peter Bowker’s storytelling.
Sean says: “It’s the Second World War which I think is always interesting and the fact that Peter is involved, and the BBC – but especially the writing. I spoke to Peter on a few occasions and he filled me in on how this wasn’t really a retelling of the war and the machines, the artillery, the infantry.
“It was a personal story of people coming together in the most extraordinary of circumstances, a very intimate portrayal of men and women whose lives changed dramatically – not just a few lives, everyone in the world. That is quite an extraordinary occurrence. This has left a big impression on me because I remember the characters and how difficult it was for people.”
One of the most compelling relationships in the show is between Sean’s character Douglas and Lesley’s character Robina Chase, whose son Harry is dating Douglas’s daughter. In fact, the pair have such chemistry that writer Peter penned extra scenes for them, realising they were stealing the show.
Sean smiles: “I hadn’t worked with Lesley before but I’d always been a big fan of hers. I watched her in Grown Ups with Mike Leigh many years ago which was fantastic and in every scene she always gives a good account of herself.
“She’s a brilliant actress and it’s been really very nice to work with Lesley. It’s an interesting throwing together of two characters who are basically very, very different.
“Douglas is a working-class, Left-wing pacifist, Robina is a gentrified lady of the manor who is very stuck in her ways and politics and has Right-wing views. But as the war unfolds, we soften our stances because we have to. At first we don’t get on, but my daughter is going out with her son and, in that funny way, they do have something in common because they’re so forthright in their beliefs. You don’t find many people like that. By the end they have quite a lot in common.”
As well as World On Fire, Sean has just wrapped several other projects. So what’s next? He groans: “I’m having a bit of time off! I’ve been working non-stop back to back for a few years so I’m enjoying my garden!”
https://newslanes.com/2019/09/18/sean-bean-on-becoming-a-war-hero-turned-conscientious-objector-in-bbc-drama/https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1179714/sean-bean-film-bbc-world-on-fireSean Bean demanded that he didn’t die in WWII drama World On Fire
Sean Bean made sure that his character survived before joining World Of Fire. The actor is known for a weird quirk in his roles where the character he is playing ends up biting the dust. Ned Stark in Game Of Thrones, Boromir in Lord Of The Rings, Alec Trevelyan in Goldeneye and Ulric in Black Death are just some of the ways Sean has bitten the dust on screen. It’s something the 60-year-old is well aware of, so before deciding to play Douglas Bennett he only had one question for the show’s creator Peter Bowker. He told press at the show’s launch: ‘It was a telephone conversation and I said, “I don’t die in this one, do I?” and he said, “No, no you’ll be fine. You’re alright.”‘ So now he knows Douglas makes it out alright (this series anyway!), he’s well up for coming back for more episodes if they get the green light.
Sean said: ‘It’s something that’s just unfolding at the moment and all doors are left open.
There’s a lot more story to tell. I’m certainly interested because I want to know what happens to me children. There’s a lot of good potential to come.’ Bowker backed up the star’s comments, revealing: ‘I’d seen him in Broken and I thought, I bet we can get Sean to do this role, because you can see where actors are moving.
https://metro.co.uk/2019/09/19/sean-bean-demanded-that-he-didnt-die-in-wwii-drama-world-on-fire-10767425/ World On Fire stars Blake Harrison and Parker Sawyers are avoiding social media reaction to their new drama. The actors are going to try and avoid reading the hashtag when World On Fire airs later this month. Harrison, likely speaking from experience when fans reacted badly to the Inbetweeners 10th anniversary event Fwends Reunited, said negative feedback online can take you to ‘bad mental places’. Speaking to press at the World On Fire launch, he said: ‘ think this will be one of those things that trends or something like that. It’s a terrible idea to click on it and just swipe through.
https://metro.co.uk/2019/09/19/world-on-fire-cast-blake-harrison-and-parker-sawyers-on-social-medias-dark-side-it-takes-you-to-bad-mental-places-10766736/#WorldOnFire comes to @BBCOne on 29th September at 9pm. What would you fight for
https://www.instagram.com/p/B2jfln5HjB4/ Will #SeanBean finally survive a series without being killed off? The #GameOfThrone stars appears in @BBCOne's blockbusting new Sunday night drama #worldonfire and it sounds like a corker, real acting departure too. Must-read interview by @Jen_Pharo in @Daily_Express today.
https://twitter.com/MattNixson/status/1174613180355612672Sean Bean blasts Tony Blair ahead of starring in epic new war drama on BBC1
The actor is critical of the former Prime Minister's role in the Middle East
When talking about his character in his epic new drama about the Second World War, Sean Bean praises the people who fought that battle – but the veteran actor is anti the more recent conflict in the Middle East .
‘We all got behind our countries to fight Hitler ,’ he says.
‘But there haven’t been many wars that have been worth fighting for, including the Middle East.
‘It was all based on lies. Tony Blair , in my opinion, should be held to account.’
But whatever your own view, World on Fire is a powerful portrayal of the human cost of conflict.
To describe this sweeping new drama as ‘epic’ is something of an understatement.
World on Fire is set in the Second World War , but the cinematic scale of the production belies the intimacy of the very human stories about people across Europe – from Manchester to Warsaw, Paris to Berlin.
These are the intimate, interlinked tales of their everyday lives, loves and losses.
And Sean is more than impressed with the result.
‘It’s not focussed on history and the leaders, the likes of Mussolini , Hitler and Churchill ,’ he explains.
‘It’s more the effects on normal people who are caught up in the war.
'How the writer, Peter Bowker, has done that is brilliant.’
Sean plays Douglas, a Manchester bus conductor.
He’s a pacifist and conscientious objector, having suffered terrible shellshock in the First World War .
‘He’s one of those strong men who went off to war and came back mentally disturbed because of what they witnessed – like their mate next to them getting their head blasted off,’ says Sean.
‘Of course that would traumatise you. So Douglas’s attitude is, “Don’t let’s do this again” because there will be more horror and brutality to come.
‘My Grandad served in the Navy in the Second World War and was up in Murmansk at the top of Russia, in Arctic conditions.
Apparently when he came back he was shaky and on edge, drinking a lot.
'It took him time to find his confidence again.’
Douglas is a widower with two children – ne’er do well Tom and gutsy Lois, who is a factory worker with singing aspirations.
It’s through Lois and her boyfriend Harry that the drama opens up across Europe, as he goes to Warsaw as a dipl
https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/sean-bean-blasts-tony-blair-20097574World on Fire, the new Second World War TV drama that doesn’t take sides
Screenwriter Peter Bowker tells Andrew Billen why the drama looks at the war through British, German, French, Polish and American eyes
All together now. “I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received . . .” Do nine out of ten British dramas about the Second World War feature a family listening to Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of war on September 3, 1939 — or is it rather more than that?
I have to tell you now, there is just such a scene in World on Fire, the Sunday-night wartime drama beginning this month on BBC One. The difference is that in this show there is a heated family discussion about boyfriends raging in the kitchen at the same time.
“That was absolutely deliberate,” says Peter Bowker, the writer of Eric and Ernie, Marvellous, The A Word and this seven-parter, designed eventually…
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/world-on-fire-the-new-second-world-war-tv-drama-that-doesnt-take-sides-fhwqfbssr