Safe Hands

He spent his twenties playing Romeos − including the ill-fated Robb Stark in Game Of Thrones − but now Richard Madden is swapping the Bard for Bodyguard, BBC One’s hot new drama. Here, he tells Lucy Pavia why he’s ready to grow up.

The first 20 minutes of Jed Mercurio’s new BBC One show Bodyguard should come with a health warning.

I’m forbidden from revealing too much here, but it’s a high-stakes scenario worthy of a big-budget Hollywood action movie, where, for several long minutes, you wonder if anyone on screen − including our new protagonist, police protection officer David Budd (Richard Madden) − will make it out alive.

Madden has past form in this sort of sofa-tipping television. Who can forget the horror twist of the Game Of Thrones Red Wedding, which saw Madden’s Robb Stark and his family annihilated in the worst character bloodbath since the Royal Wedding episode of Dynasty?

As it happens, when I speak to Madden he’s been at another Game Of Thrones wedding in his native Scotland, this time between old friends and co-stars Kit Harington and Rose Leslie (‘there were no Red Wedding jokes, thank god,’ he says, ‘though I was waiting for them’), and enjoying a bit of downtime in the highlands, scaling Munros. He grew up further south, just outside Glasgow in a small village called Elderslie. ‘I love being up there, when it’s quiet and you can see a bit of horizon,’ he says in a still-broad Scottish accent. ‘In London, everything is right in front of your face.’

To talk to, Madden is warm and a little diffident. He first got into acting to combat shyness as a kid, but still gets occasional attacks of it now. ‘I can get up on stage in front of 2,000 people and play Romeo,’ he says, ‘but I’d struggle to stand up in a room of 15 people and read something. I’ve got [to speak at] a friend’s wedding in September and that terrifies me more than Bodyguard coming out.’