Isaac Hempstead Wright
Isaac Hempstead Wright is an actor, born 1999.
Isaac Hempstead Wright was a child when Game of Thrones began in 2011 and an adult by the time it finished in 2019, and very nearly everything on his record dates from inside that window. Bran Stark was the part, and it is a strange one to be handed at that age: a boy who spends most of the series being carried, wheeled or hauled north while the plot happens to other people. It earned him a Young Artist Award nomination for supporting work in a television series, and it set the terms of his career before he had chosen any of them.
What the role actually demanded was stillness. Bran loses the use of his legs early and then, season by season, loses most of his expressiveness as well, so the acting problem was how to hold an audience with a face that is deliberately going blank. Whether the character worked remains one of the show's more argued questions, but the problem itself was genuinely odd, and not many teenagers get asked to solve it.
Outside Westeros the list is short. There is the ghost story The Awakening from the same year the series started, the legal thriller Closed Circuit in 2013, the orphan Eggs in Laika's stop-motion feature The Boxtrolls in 2014, a voice part in Revolting Rhymes in 2017, and a supporting role in the 2021 spaceflight drama Voyagers. The credits since have been sparse.
Movies (7)
TV (1)
Where to start with Isaac Hempstead Wright
Game of Thrones is unavoidable and it is also the only full showcase, so start there and accept that his best material arrives late, once Bran stops being a boy in a cart and turns into something colder and less legible. Watch the arc rather than the last season, and you can see a young actor choosing to give less and less.
The Boxtrolls is the second thing to see and by far the most charming: he voices Eggs, and the stop-motion around him is extraordinary craft. The Awakening is a well-made English ghost story that asks him to be quietly terrified, and Closed Circuit is a competent thriller with a small part in it. Voyagers is for people who like their science fiction shouty. Game of Thrones: The Last Watch is a documentary shot around the show's final production and only worth it if you loved the series enough to miss the crew.