Our boy Sean Bean is, if you think about it, the king of dying dramatically. Between Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, the actor kind of has the gold medal for getting axed on camera — and he’s well aware of all the memes about it, thank you very much.
“I realized there were quite a lot of deaths without anybody needing to tell me,” Bean recently joked with Radio Times during an interview for his new series This City Is Ours. “It was obvious.”
Thankfully, he knows it’s all in good fun — plus, playing the kinds of characters that end up dying is usually a fun challenge for him as an actor.
“I was playing some great characters, juicy, nasty pieces of work, and I thought I’d rather play them and die than play a mundane character that lives,” the actor explained. “But it came to a point with all the memes, and I thought, ‘Maybe I should stop dying as much.’ But it doesn’t bother me anymore. And, you know, I’m not really dead!”
Bean has died on-screen somewhere in the realm of 20+ times, which is fairly impressive. A few years back, he arguably died his most gruesome death on-screen in Brandon Cronenberg’s horror-thriller Possessor — it’s so gnarly, trust me — but fans are most familiar with his two fantasy-themed on-screen annihilations.
Warning! Spoilers for The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones follow:
Bean played Boromir, son of Denethor II the 26th steward of Gondor, in 2001’s Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. However, he dies heroically after an ambush by the Uruk-hai, despite the fact that he had been following Frodo and Sam in an attempt to steal the ring.
Years later, Bean would be further immortalized as Ned Stark, the patriarch of the Stark family, in the beloved HBO series adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. But Stark doesn’t make it beyond the first season; He is beheaded by the order of King Joffrey after he refuses to be loyal to the Lannister family in Episode 9.
That said, no matter how many times or ways he does it, Bean is always dying with class.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
