Richard Madden (Robb Stark) talks leaving Game of Thrones behind, and other cast member news

Richard Madden hasn’t been on Game of Thrones since the show’s third season, when Robb Stark was brutally killed at the infamous Red Wedding. But you’d best believe he still gets asked about what’s coming in the show’s upcoming eighth and final season. “Jon Snow saves the day and kills everyone,” he told iNews.

Wait…really?

No, of course not. “People often ask me if I know what’s happening next. I don’t, but I’m going to start making things up.”

It must be tricky, being best known for a role you played five years ago. Madden has, of course, played other parts since Thrones, including a high-profile turn as the Prince in Disney’s 2015 live-action remake of Cinderella. But even that felt a bit like an extension of his Thrones character, albeit the PG-rated version.

These days, Madden is striking further out, playing the title role in Bodyguard, a six-part BBC1 series about a former soldier working through post-traumatic stress assigned the protect the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom. “It was good to take on a much more adult character,” Madden said. “We tried to handle his PTSD in a delicate way that wasn’t all defining but in a way that we could touch on it sensitively and gently and see how it was affecting this man’s every day life.” Then, next year, he’ll play Elton John’s manager and lover John Reid in Rocketman, a biopic about the singer; no danger of anyone mistaking these characters for the King in the North.

And when Madden isn’t trying to avoid getting typecast as the Game of Thrones guy, he’s trying to avoid getting typecast as a generic hunk, with iNews relating that every script he reads has him taking off his shirt within the first 15 minutes. “I try to take jobs where the nudity is relevant,” he said. “You talk to someone differently when you’re naked so if its necessary because it is showing an intimacy, I take those things into consideration. But if it’s just a gratuitous: ‘And now we’ll have a scene of him in the shower,’ then that’s pointless.”

But he’s not out of the Whispering Wood yet, and still watches Game of Thrones long after his character was killed off in a scene he finds hard to watch for reasons beyond the obvious brutality. “It was riddled with a lot of other things for me because that was my family for five years. There was a death of the character and then a death of a big chapter in my life.”

A lot of his former cast members went through that just recently, after filming on the final season of Thrones wrapped up. “I think it’s the right time for it [to end].”

In other news, a pair of Game of Thrones cast members are joining forces White House Farm, an upcoming ITV drama about Jeremy Bamber, who was sentenced to life in prison after killing five family members on a farm in 1985. Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy) will play Brett Collins, Bamber’s friend. Addy will play Stan Jones, a prosecutor convinced of Bamber’s guilt. Sounds like things will work out for him.

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