Richard Madden
Richard Madden is an actor, born 1986.
Richard Madden was cast in his first role at eleven and made his screen debut in 2000, then did the proper training anyway at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and toured with Shakespeare's Globe as Romeo in 2007. Game of Thrones ran him from 2011 to 2013 as Robb Stark, a part that made him famous and then, characteristically for that show, stopped.
What followed is one of the better second acts among that cast, because he found the thing he is genuinely good at: playing men who are barely holding together while being paid to look composed. David Budd in Bodyguard is the definitive version, a protection officer whose professional stillness is a lid on something much worse, and Madden plays the opening episode's long set piece almost entirely with his eyes. It won him a Golden Globe and put him on Time's list of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2019.
The Hollywood run since has been uneven. Ikaris in Eternals is a cold, difficult part in a film that had too many other things to do, Citadel handed him an expensive spy franchise with very little to play, and Killer Heat came and went. He is better in support: John Reid in Rocketman, where he has to be charming and cruel inside the same scene, and Lieutenant Blake in 1917, one late scene the entire film has been walking toward. Medici, in which he plays Cosimo de' Medici, remains the underrated entry.
Movies (12)
TV (7)
Where to start with Richard Madden
Bodyguard first, and ideally in as few sittings as you can manage. Six episodes, one enormous performance, and an opening sequence that is as good as British television gets at sustained tension.
Game of Thrones is how most people met him, and the early seasons hold up, though the part is more thankless than it looked at the time. Medici: Masters of Florence is the one to try if the restraint in Bodyguard appealed. Rocketman is the best film performance, a charmer with the temperature turned right down, and 1917 is worth staying to the end of for a single scene of his. Cinderella is a perfectly good prince, Citadel is the expensive one that never quite finds him, and Eternals is for Marvel completists.