Isaac Hempstead Wright played Bran Stark in seven out of eight seasons of Game of Thrones, which grew in the telling from a largely under-the-radar new fantasy series to the biggest hit on TV. He was just a 10-year-old kid when they filmed the pilot for the show, and couldn't possibly have predicted how huge the show would become.
“And, for me as a kid, I didn’t really know what was going on," Wright told The Times. "I just thought, ‘Gosh, this will be exciting. This is a sort of fun extracurricular activity.’ But there were real conversations between my parents, weighing up whether it’s something you should let your child go into. There were discussions between them whether to actually, sort of politely decline and say is this just going to be a bit of a distraction?"
Obviously, Wright's parents let him take the role, and it sounds like they did a good job of keeping him grounded. He was getting educated full-time during his time on the show, and his mother chaperoned him to and from set until he was 17. “She was insistent on [me] keeping at school, having other interests, not letting it totally dominate your life,” Wright said. He admits there was a time when "the showbiz world was more alluring than being locked up in the Kent countryside” but overall Wright came out of the experience a well-adjusted young man thankful for the opportunities the show gave him. "There could have been nothing more painful, really, than then watching what it became," he said. "Having that big ‘what if … ?’”
"There wasn’t quite the level of hatred right back then"
Sometime child stars like Wright go through difficulties. Take Daniel Radcliffe, who played the title role in the Harry Potter movies. He was once locked in a cupboard by four of his friends from school, who then chanted, “Magic your way out of that, dickhead!” at a house party. Later, Radcliffe struggled with alcohol abuse, something he happily got past.
HBO is now making a new Harry Potter TV show, and they just announced who will be playing the three main roles: Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Alastair Stout as Ron Weasley and Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger. Some fans are nervous for what these kids are about to go through, Wright had a tricky enough time navigating child stardom back before the social media age, which adds a whole new layer of potential difficulty. “Twitter had pretty much just come out in 2009 when we shot the pilot [for Game of Thrones],” Hempstead Wright said. “And I can remember one or two of the actors having it, but all being very exciting. I insisted on getting my own Twitter account, which my mum would mediate. You just get so excited when you have about 40 followers — let alone the millions that you get overnight now."
"We didn’t quite have the same scrutiny that you would have now. There wasn’t quite the level of hatred right back then."
Also, while the Harry Potter show will have a ton of eyeballs on it right out of the gate, Game of Thrones grew over time. Still, Wright is mostly excited for what these kids are about to experience. “What a ride they’ve got in store, because, like me, most of them are unknowns," he said. “It’s easy to concentrate, often for good reason, on some of the more difficult aspects of it. But I’m excited for them, for the experiences they’re going to have, for the parts of the world they’re going to see.”
Wright has some advice for the new Harry Potter actors: “[J]ust enjoy every minute of it, take every opportunity it affords you.” Wright has certainly done that. During the filming of Game of Thrones, he got into physics. Normally, that would be a personal thing, but because Game of Thrones was huge at the time, the producers arranged for him to interview celebrity physicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. “So it was like being a bit like a competition winner. I think if you have that attitude to it, of never sort of taking it for granted, [being aware of] what an opportunity this is at every juncture, then you can’t go far wrong,” Wright said.
Today, the 26-year-old Wright seems mostly done with acting. He got a degree in neuroscience and is now doing "clinical training" in London. But there's no way to forget his time as the current Lord of the Seven Kingdoms. “I can go to any country in the world and there will be someone there who’s pleased to see me. You go to some little bar in Madrid or wherever, and somebody will want to strike up a chat with you. It’s made the world a much smaller place,” he said.
Should the new Harry Potter show be a success, hopefully the young actors will take to stardom as gracefully. The show will film this summer with a probable release date on HBO and HBO Max of late 2026 at the earliest, and quite possibly 2027.
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