Game of Thrones’ lost boy finds his fate
LONDON — It’s a familiar refrain in Game of Thrones: “We don’t get to choose who we love.”
When he was just 10 years old, Isaac Hempstead-Wright, playing young scion Bran Stark, had one of the first episode’s more frightening, and memorable, moments.
Climbing an abandoned tower in Game of Thrones’ fictional kingdom of Westeros, Bran — who as a child enjoyed climbing the rock walls of Winterfell — came across villainous Jamie Lannister, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, being romantically inappropriate with his twin sister Cersei Lannister, played by Lena Headey.
Jaimie, in order to keep his incestuous relationship secret from his powerful, controlling father, shoved Bran off the tower roof, causing the boy to fall to the ground below, shattering his spine and paralyzing him for life.
Bran has been on the run and in hiding ever since, separated from his family, each not knowing where the other is, the children’s mother, father and older siblings all dead, murdered at the hands of the Lannisters.
The violence in Game of Thrones may seem over-thetop at times, but HempsteadWright, now 15, is having the time of his life.
“I think it’s pretty much every teenager’s dream to be able to step into a world of swords and beheaded heads and, like, skulls everywhere,” he says, with a cheerful laugh. Nothing to see here, move right along. Nothing morbid about it at all. “I think it’s really cool, walking around on set and there’s a line of dead bodies beside you, which you go and take pictures of. I find it great fun.”
Bran Stark is Game of Thrones’ wild child, an outcast — lonely and unprotected, except by a close circle of friends. In the coming season, which debuts Sunday, Bran will learn more about his destiny, who he is and what the fates have in store for him. The boy is becoming a man, and fate is about to take an unexpected turn.