Why Sean Bean does not mind being killed off

Telegraph

25-03-2025

The actor Sean Bean has revealed why he does not mind being killed off in his film and television roles.
The award-winning Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones star, 65, addressed becoming an online meme for the number of times his characters are killed off in series.
Bean admitted that he would rather play 'great' characters who get killed off rather than star as 'mundane' ones who end up surviving.
In his four-decade acting career, Bean has been run off a cliff by rampaging cows, impaled by an anchor, beheaded and quartered by horses.
He told the Radio Times: 'I realised there were quite a lot of deaths without anybody needing to tell me. It was obvious. But I was playing some great characters, juicy, nasty pieces of work, and I thought I'd rather play them and die than play a mundane character that lives.'
However, he added that the meme barrage came to a point where he thought 'maybe I should stop dying as much', before he added: 'But it doesn't bother me any more. And, you know, I'm not really dead!'
The social media campaign about the issue, with the hashtag #dontkillseanbean, began more than a decade ago when Bean was starring as undercover FBI agent Martin Odum in the TV series Legends.
Speaking to The Telegraph about it at the time, he said: 'I've died a lot of different deaths. Maybe it's the quality of my death people are fascinated by. I liked Lord of the Rings. Big death.'
As Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Bean dies by taking three arrows to the chest while defending the hobbits. He has called this death 'heroic'.
The viral social media campaign to prevent Bean's characters from dying, and which saw supporting T-shirts at that year's San Diego Comic-Con, was said to have amused the actor himself.
Marketing executives at the American network TNT, which produced the Legends series, said Bean had 'laughed out loud' when first told about the hashtag.
'[He] is 100 per cent behind not getting killed in Legends,' Tricia Melton, a marketing executive, said, adding: 'He's got a great sense of humour and is enjoying the fun the fans are having.'
As Tadhg McCabe in The Field, Bean is pushed off of a cliff by a herd of cattle in the film's climax in one of the more unusual deaths in his career.
Elsewhere in Radio Times, Bean discussed being 'typecast' early in his career because he was 'good at playing villains', such as 006 in GoldenEye and Sean Miller in Patriot Games.
'You can't complain about it,' he said, explaining: 'You just try and branch out in different ways'.
In the 1992 film Patriot Games, Bean spends most of the movie pursuing Harrison Ford's character for revenge and is ultimately killed by him when he is impaled by an anchor.
Addressing the source of his 'rage' to play angry characters, he added: 'I've never really seen it as a problem to perform anger or distress. I can snap into that quite easily.
'We've all seen people, our family or friends, turning on a sixpence, going into a rage; it's shocking and something you always remember.'
'Unintended legacy'
The actor has previously described the memes of him from his Game of Thrones character Lord Eddard (Ned) Stark, which he played in nine episodes of the show, as his 'unintended legacy'.
The TV adaptation of George RR Martin's books saw Bean get decapitated unexpectedly for treason in the first season.
Bean, who is starring in a new BBC gang drama titled This Is Our City, added that his grandchildren won't be watching the latest show because it was 'often brutal'.
He said: 'I don't like gratuitous violence and I don't particularly like big fight scenes or battle scenes, people just being mowed down by machine guns recklessly.'