Game of Thrones is the biggest show of the last 10 years, made with scale and ambition like nothing else at the time. Walking onto that set would be intimidating for any actor, let alone one fresh out of drama school like John Bradley (Samwell Tarly).
Bradley spoke about his early days on the set to iampro, recalling that he didn’t even know what a call sheet was when he started playing Sam. “That’s another thing that drama schools could maybe help out with,” he quipped.
There’s some really solid info in there, especially for people interested in acting or production, but I especially like the bit where he talks about the importance of good leadership on a set. “If there’s bad energy, I think that trickles down from the top,” Bradley said. “Because our producers, David Benioff and Dan Weiss and Bernie Caulfield…and all our top brass…they had all the pressure of this show on their shoulders, but they were so calm, and so friendly and so welcoming and had such great personalities, everybody on the crew felt relaxed as well…We were all very lucky with them that they set the tone and made sure everybody had a brilliant time.”
John Bradley is ready to play characters like Sam Tarly again
Bradley trained himself up during his time on Game of Thrones and emerged a full-stack actor ready to take on any number of roles…except he kept getting offers to play characters a lot like Sam Tarly. “It didn’t feel like anybody was really going to offer me anything different to that,” he told Yahoo. I got a lot of very similar parts, really, and then one day this script came through for this ever so slightly bumbling but also quite confident and quite sharp and quite capable music manager, operating at the top of that kind of entertainment pyramid. I just thought that would have given me so much scope to play a lot of different aspects of my own personality that I’ve never played before.”
That part was the role of Colin Calloway in Marry Me, a rom-com Bradley starred in alongside Jennifer Lopez. “Because enough people have seen Marry Me now, I feel comfortable to play some of the old favourites again,” Bradley said. “My character in Moonfall, it’s kind of similar to my character in Game of Thrones, I suppose, in terms of somebody that’s very smart, but somebody who nobody will listen to, and the frustrations of knowing you’re right and nobody giving you the time of day, I played similar things like that before.”
"Ever since Marry Me…I don’t feel the pressure to necessarily shy away from similar parts to what I played before because I feel I operated in Marry Me in a completely different atmosphere, a completely different environment and a completely different type of film."
Both Marry Me and Moonfall are available to stream now, on Peacock and Amazon Prime Video respectively. He’s also teaming up with Benioff and Weiss again for their new sci-fi Netflix series The Three-Body Problem.
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