BOND IN HIS SIGHTS
Sending pulses racing with stellar performances in Bodyguard and Game of Thrones, actor Richard Madden has sent the Bond rumour mill into overdrive, says
Everything you need to know about acting pin-up Richard Madden
He’s the heartthrob at the centre of the biggest drama of the year, a brooding Scot now tipped as a frontrunner to replace Daniel Craig when he retires as James Bond. Playing blue-eyed, lantern-jawed David Budd, the specialist police protection officer in the BBC’s explosive political series Bodyguard has brought Richard Madden an intensity of attention that caught everyone off-guard, including the 32-year-old actor.
‘People asked me, “Did you know it was going to do so well?” And no, I didn’t have a clue because it was about surviving quite a gruelling shoot. I was just trying to get to the end of the week,’ the actor said. ‘And to think this little British TV show that we all worked really hard on had such an impact is a bit overwhelming for me. I think one in four people in Britain watched it, which is crazy.’
Madden shares the same chiselled bone structure and heavy duty eyebrows as a young Sean Connery, but it was the second episode of the political thriller that ignited the Bond references, when the smartly-suited Madden reverses a car at speed from gunfire, saves the Tory home secretary (Keeley Hawes), then grabs a semi-automatic weapon and sprints off after their assailant.
Immaculately handsome, handy with a gun, and embroiled in an affair with a woman who doesn’t make it to the final credits? The Bond rumour mill immediately cranked into action, and
Madden has enjoyed playful teasing about how the role of Bond could be overhauled. He’d ‘absolutely’ play second fiddle to a female Bond. ‘If it was a good part. If it was an interesting part, a Bond Boy would be an interesting dynamic. Why not?’
The ultimate accolade may be the James Bond talk, but Bodyguard’s popularity has been such that the anti-terrorism police used the show to boost recruitment, while Bodyguard’s creator Jed Mercurio is planning a second series after completing Line of Duty. Earlier this year Madden collected a Golden Globe for best actor in a television drama.
Filming the six one-hour episodes took five months, with Madden appearing in almost every scene, with no time off and few opportunities to see friends and family.
For the first time in a major role, Madden uses his own accent, after insisting at his first meeting with Jed Mercurio that Budd had to be Scottish. ‘It just made it a bit easier to get a sense of him,’ he says. ‘I did work for so many years and had not been Scottish in anything. I was like, “You know what? I just want to do my own accent”.’
He admired Sean Bean for doing something similar at the start of Game of Thrones. ‘The Stark family weren’t actually supposed to speak with a Northern accent when we started,’ he says. ‘We were all supposed to be RP. Then Sean Bean came in and just said, “I’m not doing that. I’m just gonna be myself”. So that’s when they were like, “Right, the dialect coach has to teach everyone to do this accent now...”’
Three seasons of Game of Thrones made Madden famous, but not rich; he remembers being so skint in New York that when he crossed town, he could only afford to ride a bus that carried a huge picture of him advertising the next instalment of the Iron Throne series. ‘I was 22 with nothing on my CV,’ he noted ruefully. ‘So I was paid nothing. I know roughly what some of the leads get now,’ he says. ‘And we’re talking changing the decimal place by a few.
‘That would have been nice, but at the same time I look back at all the different jobs I’ve done since I finished and I look at some of the actors who I love on that show and they’ve not maybe had the opportunity to do those things, because they’ve been tied to the show, whereas I’ve played a lot more different parts.’
If Madden is ambivalent about fame and fortune, it’s partly because he only started acting to help him overcome shyness, and his first experience of attention almost put him off performing for good. Growing up in Elderslie, Renfrewshire, with his mum and dad Pat and Richard Sr, and sisters Cara and Lauren, he was a nervous child, who found the prospect of moving up from primary to secondary school terrifying.
‘I thought, “how do I get confident?”’ he reflected, years later. ‘My best friend was really cool, and she went to a youth theatre in Paisley, so I thought, maybe that’s the way to do it. I went along, and I immediately found something I was passionate about and really enjoyed.’ He attended the children’s theatre group PACE, then started chasing roles.
His father, a fireman, would get up at 4am to drive him to auditions while he slept in the back with a duvet. His first ever job, at 11, was as ‘Young Andy’ in an adaptation of the Iain Banks novel Complicity.
Then he was cast as a lead with pop star turned actress Toyah Willcox in CBBC series Barmy Aunt Boomerang. He spent two years on TV sets, surrounded by adults, and skipping school. When he
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Madden shares the same bone structure and eyebrows as a young Sean Connery
returned to class, he struggled to fit in. ‘I was at a rough high school where admitting you were an actor didn’t go down well,’ he laughed. ‘There was no cool factor and I got teased a lot. I couldn’t keep it quiet because I was on TV twice a week.’
As a child, he also found the generous buffet during filming hard to resist, and became overweight. Bullies at school taunted him for having a 38-inch waist. ‘I didn’t wear denim until I was 19 because my mum couldn’t take jeans up. It was hard to take denim up, when you’re sewing, so I wore chinos.’
Even now, as a successful actor, weight remains a preoccupation. During his career, he’s had his skin pinched and presented as rolls of fat, and he’s been strapped into costumes so constricting they feel like corsets. ‘I’ve done loads of jobs where I’ve been asked, or told, I need to lose weight – or I need to be in the gym every day. And that sucks, because it actually gets in the way of the job a bit,’ he said. ‘And also because it’s just unrealistic; not everyone walks around with six-packs, unless you’re on Love Island.’
Back at school, he succumbed to peer pressure and gave up acting entirely for a while to rediscover a more normal childhood. It wasn’t until he turned 17 that he decided to give it another go at drama school.
His teachers tried to dissuade him, telling him that he would not get a place, and even if he did, he would never get a job, but his parents supported their son at every turn. ‘They never questioned or discouraged it, they only encouraged it, so it’s thanks to them I’m even here,’ he said in his Golden Globe acceptance speech, with Pat and Richard smiling broadly in the audience.
After studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, jobs with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Globe Theatre in London followed. There were appearances in the gentle period drama Larkrise to Candleford, an episode of Taggart (‘Everyone who has been to RSAMD must appear in Taggart!’).
There was also a lead in a comedy-drama series called Sirens as a world-weary paramedic who resented being treated like a glorified taxi driver by the late night revellers of Leeds. As research, he spent a nightshift with a real ambulance service, starting with a call from a dementia patient and her daughter. ‘We picked them up and, because the radio could be played in the back, it was like a disco ambulance,’ he recalled. ‘One of the crew was taking the lady’s blood pressure, the daughter’s crying, Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance is playing and the patient’s
dancing. ‘I was like, “OK, now I can see why this show is being made”. This could be quite funny if it wasn’t so weird.’
The game changer was being cast as young King in the North, Robb Stark, in Game of Thrones in 2011. The Sopranos of Middle Earth brought him global recognition that still has fans shouting ‘King in the North’ at him on the street.
Madden learned to ride a horse and fight with a sword for the role, attacking these skills quite literally; practising his rapier technique in a Belfast hotel room at 5am with a broom handle, and breaking so many of the show’s stock of replica swords on set that the show’s armourer pleaded with him to go easy on his props because he was running out of blades.
Robb’s bloody end in the notorious ‘Red Wedding’ episode that also claimed the life of his mother and wife was perhaps his highlight, working with people who had become close friends. At the end of the scene’s seven-day shoot, he skipped the series’ after-party and headed straight to the airport for the last plane to London, still wearing a medieval tunic covered in fake blood.
‘I cried all the way home,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t like things being over. I never have, and Thrones was such a big closing chapter in my life. I’d spent more time with my on-screen mother, Michelle Fairley, over those years, than my real mother, so we were having to say goodbye as friends as well as colleagues in the most violent and horrible way.’
The show raised Madden’s profile to the point that he was taking meetings with the likes of heavyweight writer and showrunner Jed Mercurio. They worked together for the first time on a TV adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, with Madden playing lusty gardener Mellors.
He then played the more cleancut prince in Sir Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella for Disney. It was also one of his less perilous performances; on the mini-series Klondike he did many of his own stunts, and he nearly froze after throwing himself into river rapids.
However, on Cinderella there were moments where he thought he might die of embarrassment, especially after trying on the Prince’s unforgiving white leggings in front of Sir Kenneth and the film’s Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell. ‘Everybody was looking at what they could or couldn’t see under the light,’ he said. ‘One was basically a corset for men and they had a long chat about it until I finally had to say, with tears in my eyes, “I’m going to be sick, can I please take this off?”’
Madden says that he accepted the role once he had been reassured that, contrary to his original impression, he wasn’t being asked to join a panto. When he told his family back in Scotland that he had been cast as Prince Charming, they laughed in his face. ‘Endlessly! They could not stop, and they made
“The game changer was being cast as Robb Stark in Game of Thrones
fun of me about it for a long time,’ laughs Madden.
Although a pin-up for the social media generation, Madden’s own romantic history has still to find its happy ever after. His longest relationship has been Doctor Who star Jenna Coleman. They met in 2012 when she was still best known for Emmerdale and he had just started playing Robb Stark in Game of Thrones, and split in 2015. Flings with TV presenters Caroline Flack and Laura Whitmore, then model Suki Waterhouse ignited then fizzled out. He was linked to his Cinderella co-star Lily James, especially after Kenneth Branagh then cast them in his West End production of Romeo And Juliet, but they both said they were nothing more than friends. His latest relationship, with 22-year-old Les Miserables actress Ellie Bamber, ended earlier this year.
Professionally, he has also still to settle. The accolades he had received for his Bodyguard role had ‘certainly given me a lot more confidence in my career’ but he’s currently looking to move away from hunk du jour roles, and says he will be more selective about stripping off for the camera in future. However, he did film a nude love scene for his new film Rocketman, a fictionalised biopic about Elton John, where he plays the singer’s manager and one-time boyfriend John Reid.
For Madden, the differences between male and female co-stars are minor. ‘With one you get stubble rash, right?’ he says. ‘That’s basically it. Otherwise, there’s no difference. It’s storytelling.’
“Although a pinup, Madden’s own romantic history has still to find its happy ever after
This summer Madden returns to Scotland to shoot Sam Mendes’ World War I drama 1917 after spending a few months in Los Angeles testing the power of his new profile with Hollywood producers and casting agents.
Does this mean he is likely to get behind the wheel of an Aston Martin? Dad Richard Sr has said playing 007 is on his son’s wish list. ‘I’m quite sure he does want that to be on his CV one day but he’s not making a song and dance about it,’ said Madden’s father. ‘Whether it’s Bond or any big role, Richard has ideas about things he’d like to do.’
Madden’s more immediate plans include doing what he always does when he’s finished a job. After 1917, he’ll see family, then head out to the Highlands to decompress, scale Munros and escape recognition and selfies. ‘It takes me roughly two days of driving about the hills, coast and islands to adjust, and then my brain settles into something which I feel is more like myself,’ notes Madden, who hopes to buy a private hideaway on the west coast.
‘I sometimes think Scotland is the most beautiful country in the world. Even if the weather is really bad.’