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NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, August 10, 2014, 2:00 AM
Bean, who has a high mortality rate in projects like 'Game of Thrones' and 'The Lord of the Rings,' plays an undercover FBI agent who gets lost in his work
As the star of TNT’s new “Legends,” another job where lots of very bad people will be regularly trying to kill him, Sean Bean admits he knows how it feels to see his life pass before his eyes.
In fact, sometimes that’s all it seems to havein done.
When HBO’s “Game of Thrones” began, Bean’s Lord Eddard (Ned) Stark was, literally, the poster boy for the show — a wise and generally admired ruler.
At the end of the first season, Ned had his head chopped off and placed on a pike.
Before that, Bean was best known as Boromir in the first two movies of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
At the end of the second, Boromir fell fatally wounded amid a hail of arrows from the archers of his enemies the orcs.
In the 1995 movie “GoldenEye,” Pierce Brosnan celebrated his first James Bond role by kicking Bean’s Alec Trevelyan (aka Janus) off a 500-foot antenna tower. Trevelyan landed in a pool and got blown up.
Three years earlier, in “Patriot Games,” Bean’s Sean Miller challenged Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan. Bad call.
Ryan impaled Miller on an anchor.
It’s hard to miss that this guy gets whacked a lot.
“I discovered there’s a Sean Bean Death Tape,” says Bean, who at the moment is perched on a chair in the relative security of a balcony overlooking Beverly Hills.
“I watched it with my kids.” He laughs. “It was real nice.”
Bean adds that having his character killed off isn’t one of his conditions for taking a role. He has noted that no actor who plays with even half a deck would want to leave “Game of Thrones.”
But finishing a role on one show, even if it’s abrupt and unexpected, “can open up other opportunities,” he muses. “I’ve been fortunate in getting to do a lot of different things.
“After ‘Thrones’ I played a transvestite teacher (in the BBC production ‘Accused’). She was a good-time girl. That was quite a leap for me, taking on the nuances of a woman, walking around in stilettos.
“It was a little production, but I saw the script that had me in high heels and I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.’ ”
He’s back to flats as Martin Odum in “Legends,” which premieres Wednesday at 9 p.m.
Martin’s an FBI agent who specializes in deep undercover operations, taking on various identities to penetrate groups of serious bad guys.
The title refers to the backstories that Odum and other operatives develop to make their characters believable, and those backstories, says Bean, were what drew him to the show.
“I’m playing Martin, but I’m really playing many characters, because that’s what Martin does,” says Bean. “I’ve never played multiple characters in the same show before.”
“Legends” has Howard Gordon as an executive producer, and in some ways Odum resembles a previous Gordon character, Jack Bauer in “24.” He’s a good guy who plunges into the bad guys’ world, usually against terrible odds and often alone.
Like Jack, Martin also has a female accomplice back at the ranch, Crystal McGuire (Ali Larter). Crystal, another operative, has her own backstory with Martin, which complicates their working relationship.
Beyond the weekly cases, in which Martin must thwart terrorists, cybercrooks and the like, he has a longer-term problem.
He has been slipping into characters for so long he’s no longer sure of his own identity, or whether he even has one. His main tie to his life outside work — his wife, Sonya (Amber Valletta) — finally divorced him, and he’s having a hard time trying to be a presence for his son, Aiden (Mason Cook).
“There’s not much going on in Martin’s life,” says Bean. “That’s why he likes taking new assignments. It enables him to escape to another world. When he’s in character, he knows who he is.”
The challenge as an actor, says Bean, “is to make him very singular when you don’t see much of what he does or who he is. He’s very good, but you don’t envy the job he does. It takes a lot out of him.”
He says he doesn’t know where Gordon and company plan to take Odum, who is based on the hero of a Robert Littell novel also titled “Legends.”
“I don’t know exactly where he’s going,” says Bean, but no, he doesn’t expect Martin’s head to end up on a pike any time soon.
He’d be quite happy, he says, if “Legends” goes past this season — if only because, like other actors, he finds 10-episode cable seasons quite pleasant. It’s steady work without the nine-month commitment of 22-episode broadcast series.
“There’s a lot of good television now,” says the 55-year-old Bean, citing “Breaking Bad” and “True Detective” off the top of his head. “The stigma of movie actors doing television is gone now.”
Bean hasn’t exactly abandoned the movies, though. He’ll be seen in February in “Jupiter Ascending,” a big-budget, big-promotion space fantasy drama that also stars Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis. Bean plays a character named Stinger who is part man, part bee.
He’s never had trouble keeping busy, appearing in close to 100 productions over a 30-year career.
“I can’t imagine doing anything except acting,” he says, explaining that he enjoys the details right down to the stories behind characters’ accents.
“I love the different inflections,” he says. “I’m interested in why people talk like they do. Like Boston Irish. It’s so laid back. Why is that?”
But don’t expect him to convene a Twitter group on accents any time soon.
“I don’t do much on social media,” he says. “I don’t really want people knowing about my life.”
Still, he doesn’t mind that fans remember his characters. Or the way they died.
“I still have people come up to me on the street and ask about Ned Stark,” he says. “They’ll demand to know how could I do it. As if I’m the one who had him killed.
“But it’s quite flattering that he made such an impression.”
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