THE RIGHT KID
As Game of Thrones returns, Isaac Hempstead Wright tells Benji Wilson how the hit show affected his life
The first thing Isaac Hempstead Wright wants people to know is that when Game of Thrones is finished he’s not going to “do a Jack Gleeson”. Gleeson was the young Irish actor who played the vicious King Joffrey on HBO’s swords and sorcery epic.
When his character was killed off, Gleeson, then 20, retired from acting. He had been a lead player on the biggest show in the world, yet wanted nothing more to do with the fame game.
“I do want to keep acting,” says Hempstead Wright over lunch at a favourite Italian restaurant near his London home. But first he wants to get through university.
Now that Game of Thrones has finished filming, with just the (admittedly huge) publicity and promotion for the final season to get through, Hempstead Wright will finally get the chance.
He’s tried once already, going to Birmingham last year to study music and maths. It didn’t work out — after eight years as Bran Stark on Game of Thrones, he was simply too famous to be a student.
“I ended up being assigned a campus police officer. It was all quite surreal. My university address got published in the press, which meant that every time I walked out of my halls, pretty much I would have to do a selfie with someone. That’s the last thing you want at 9am when you’re trying to go to a maths lecture.”
It says a lot about Hempstead Wright that, though he was effectively hounded out of higher education, he is not bitter. Indeed, once the final season of GoT is out of the way, he is heading back to university to study neuroscience.
“I find the whole concept of consciousness and existence fascinating. Neuroscience is one of the most interesting routes to getting some kind of answers about it,” he says.
This will be the first chance the 19-year-old has had to live a normal life since he was cast in GoT,
aged 10.
“I just want the chance to do something of my own accord. I’ve been on this big machine for so long and yet this is still the start of my life. I fell into it when I was so young, I didn’t know what
I was doing or where I was going.”
His path to fame has not been like that of most young actors. He grew up in Kent, where he started going to the local drama club “because football club was too cold”. His teacher allowed him to do a few auditions and the last one he tried — after he’d failed to get a role in an ad for Top Gear — was for an HBO pilot called Game of Thrones. He was cast as Bran, one of the children of Northern ruler Ned (Sean Bean).
In the opening episode, Bran walks in on Jaime and Cersei Lannister, brother and sister, having sex at the top of a tower. In the first of the show’s many shocking, violent moments, Jaime pushes Bran out of the window, paralysing him from the waist down. What did Hempstead Wright’s parents make of this show?
“It was a genuine dilemma. They had to think, ‘Should we let Isaac do this?’ Not least because this is a show about incest and murder. You have to be the right kid for it and you have to be the right parents for it.”
That Hempstead Wright is so obviously levelheaded suggests he was “the right kid” (and the fact that his mother chaperoned him on set until he was 16 suggests she was the right parent). He saw some things that a 10-year-old probably shouldn’t, but he says the context was allimportant.
“The violence, basically, was fine because it’s debunked instantaneously. When you’re watching Sean Bean literally playing football with this decapitated head [off camera], the magic is lost.”
The sex, he says, just led to his mother giving him the birds-and-the-bees talk a little early. “They were like, ‘So, duck, this is not the way normal sexual relations happen.’”
However, he has no regrets: “Can you imagine if it had been the other way around and we’d said no and I’d be sitting there watching Game of Thrones having become this huge thing?”
He has a point. Many GoT
stars had barely worked before the show — now they are set for life. Hempstead Wright has bought himself the odd lavish gift — he is an accomplished pianist and now the proud owner of a Steinway grand — but he is not yet burning banknotes for fun.
“I’m in a good position compared with most people but I’m really not sorted for life. I’ve just bought a house, which was a big moment. But it’s not like I can stop working.”
Telegraph Group Ltd