Robert Aramayo on becoming Young Ned Stark and filming the Tower of Joy scene

For a character who’s been dead since Season 1, Ned Stark has featured prominently on Game of Thrones of late, thanks to Bran’s power to see into the past. In “Home,” we saw Ned Stark at around 10 years old, sparring with his brother at Winterfell. And in the most recent episode, “Oathbreaker,” we saw him facing down members of Aerys Targaryen’s kingsguard at the Tower of Joy. (Sidenote: no one has called it the Tower of Joy on the show yet—for all we know, it’s called the Big Square Block of Sorrow).

Robert Aramayo, the 23-year-old actor who played Young Ned, has been making the media rounds since “Oathbreaker” aired. He described the process of shooting the episode’s elaborate fight scene to The Hollywood Reporter:

"We all went through a bunch of training, which continued through our three- or four-day shoot in Spain. It was intense…And Luke Roberts [who plays Arther Dayne], he’s incredible, man. What a badass, dual-wielding swords and fighting four guys at the same time and dispatching three of them. It was fantastic to delve into that kind of work, because it’s the same…playing a moment in a fight is just like playing a moment as an actor. You have to have an intention. If your move’s getting blocked, you obviously can’t know that, just like when you’re playing a scene through dialogue. You can’t know the response your scene partner gives you is going to be the response you’ll get. You hope it is. Likewise, in a fight, if you’re going to chop somebody’s arm off or stab them in the gut — the intention is to chop that arm off or stab someone in the gut, and you have to play that intention fully. I didn’t expect it, but it takes a lot of skill in terms of acting to play. That’s why I feel the stunt team is so talented, that they can pull off telling you what you’re going for, that this is what you’re going for, and hopefully you’ll get it. It’s only when somebody blocks the move or does something else that you have to change the plot."

In another interview with Access Hollywood, Aramayo said that the focus of the Game of Thrones team, even the guys who work on the stunts, is “always, every time, the story.” This is heartening.

Happily, all that hard work seems to have paid off. I had my misgivings when I heard that Arthur Dayne would be duel-wielding his blades, but I think the team made it look convincing.

Aramayo has been a big fan of the show since the beginning—he watches every episode with a group of friends, one of whom has read the books and gave the actor a set of crib notes with “everything that I was not allowed to forget” ahead of filming the Tower of Joy sequence. When it came time to actually film, though, Aramayo focused on the immediacy of the situation:

"[M]y work was situated was in figuring out the parameters that surrounded this scene, this moment in time. And on a fundamental level, it’s a guy who needs to get to another place because his sister – he needs to save his sister. That’s the main drive of the scene and… I didn’t want to get too hung up in sounding like Sean because I think that would’ve sort of got in my way if I’d have just situated all my work in that place. I watched a lot of footage of him playing Ned in the first season again, repeatedly, especially one particular fight scene that he was in and I think that was the biggest help for me when creating this version of Ned – was watching what Sean did with Ned in the first season and trying to work out what a younger man’s version of that is."

Even though Aramayo didn’t purposefully imitate Sean Bean, their accents did sound similar, probably because both actors hail from Yorkshire.

Aramayo also has some opinions on the revelatory moment from this scene, the one where Ned kills Arthur Dayne after Howland Reed gets in a sneak attack. According to Aramayo, that moment may have affected Ned deeply.

"I think he’s scared at the beginning. He doesn’t want to face Arthur Dayne. He’s a legendary swordsman and Ned knows that, but he has to do what he has to do and give it everything he’s got and… I think he thinks he’s done when he gets disarmed and then, it’s as surprising to Arthur Dayne as it is to Ned when Howland Reed shows up and stabs him in the back. … I do feel like that’s a lesson learned for Ned about honor…because the told story is that Ned beat Arthur Dayne, which is…kind of untrue, really. And I think that speaks to how honor began to sort of operate for Ned and I would argue that in the [subsequent] years, he would live his life from an honorable place, having been dishonored in this moment."

So Ned’s later-in-life focus on honor may have been inspired by the moment when he acted somewhat dishonorably. Interesting.

Finally, Aramayo commented on the moment when Young Ned appears to have heard Bran call out for him. Naturally, he doesn’t much away. “He heard something, didn’t he?” he said. “Who knows what he heard? That’s all I’ll say.”

There’s almost definitely more of this scene coming, so I think we’ll find out in time.