As an actor, you want to take on roles that you can really sink your teeth into.
Whether your preferred genre is action, adventure, comedy, or drama, projects that portray characters with real depth—and hopefully some decent screen time—are the goal.
While sometimes your character might get killed off at some point in the TV show or movie you’re in, for Sean Bean, this has happened a whopping 23 times and he just can’t take it anymore.
Sean Bean is so sick of his deaths on screen that he’s decided to swear off any roles in which his character doesn’t make it through to the end credits. In an interview with The Sun, the actor said that while he was fine with being killed off at first, as the Sean Bean Death Toll got well into the double digits, he decided something had to change in his approach.
“I’ve turned down stuff. I’ve said, ‘They know my character’s going to die because I’m in it!'” Bean explained. “I just had to cut that out and start surviving, otherwise it was all a bit predictable.”
He continued: “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.'”
Bean said that while he loved playing “baddies” on screen, the roles weren’t all that rewarding in the long run as they always ended with his death. However, even his more honorable roles didn’t always have a happy ending, as we learned all the way back in Season 1 of Game of Thrones. Luckily, he was warned before he decided to get involved in the project.
“I’d read the Game Of Thrones books and they said to me, ‘You do die in this, but it’s near the end of the series.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fair enough,'” he recalled. “So they made it very clear at the time I was going to die, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to get stuck in one of these series that lasts seven years.'”
Bean added that he was sad that Ned didn’t stick around longer in the series, especially considering what a massive thing it became for HBO.
“I wish I’d have got stuck now!” he admitted. “But it was very clear what George R.R. Martin wanted to happen to Ned—and it did.”
Luckily, his character in the upcoming BBC war drama World On Fire, Douglas Bennett, won’t meet the same grisly end as his previous roles, so we should be seeing more of him on our screens soon.
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