Sean Bean on Game of Thrones

Sean Bean’s latest role didn’t require him to master many new skills from scratch. “I’m pretty good at horse riding and sword-fighting already,” he chuckles in his gruff Northern burr, “though I did have to brush up on them both a bit before filming.” It has, after all, been 18 years since Bean saddled up as Sergeant Richard Sharpe in the first of 16 swashbuckling adventures on ITV1. “Though generally,” he says, “we practise with sticks instead of swords.”

Bean is discussing his latest heroic incarnation: Lord Eddard Stark, the lead character in the new HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones. Comparisons with his biggest film role, as Boromir in Lord of the Rings, are inevitable. But Game of Thrones, says Bean, is quite different – “an edgier, sexy, dark, brooding piece, where no one is safe” and that has more “brutality, betrayal, back-stabbing, corruption and hordes of unsavoury characters.”

Based on A Song of Fire and Ice, the popular series of books by America’s contemporary answer to Tolkien, George RR Martin, Game of Thrones is indeed a sumptuous, sprawling tale of feuding families and the pursuit of power. Bloody and barbarous, but also beautiful, it has no shortage of sex, swords and savagery.

Told across 10 intense and, at times, eerie 60-minute episodes, the epic, multilayered story is set in the fictional land of Westeros, where competing clans, or Houses, have fought for generations, each dominating a different realm. Years ago, one tribe, the Targaryens, invaded to unite the Seven Kingdoms under the Iron Throne; now there’s a battle brewing to regain that throne once more.

The opening episode introduces us to carefully interwoven storylines involving the House Stark, run by Bean’s Lord Eddard Stark (Ned to his friends); House Baratheon, ruled by King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy); House Lannister, linked to House Baratheon by Queen Cersei Baratheon, née Lannister (Lena Headey); and the exiled House Targaryen, whose Prince Viserys Targaryen III (a sinister, silver-haired Harry Lloyd) has his eye on the Iron Throne and with it, all Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.

The multiple narratives are only outnumbered by the enormous cast, whose ranks are periodically reduced by plenty of bloody, unsentimental deaths.

However, although both the plots and the characters are complex, the story is not as confusing as it sounds; the four lands in which the action takes place – which include a desert wilderness and icy wastelands – are dramatically distinct.

Bean, still ruggedly handsome at the age of 51, makes Ned sound like a typical Bean character: “He’s a strong, noble and honourable warrior from the North.” At the outset, Ned journeys south at the request of King Robert, to help Robert defend his throne. Clad head to foot in fetching leather and ermine, Ned is solid and stoic – a man trying to keep his head while all those around him plot and scheme.

Martin has said that black and white moral distinctions don’t exist in the Westeros, and that each character in Game of Thrones is coloured a shade of grey.

“They all have their flaws and their redeeming features,” says Bean. “There are no out-and-out baddies, and equally, no straightforward heroes. Even Ned Stark is not an angel.”

Although it is made by the award-winning US cable network HBO, Game of Thrones has a strong British flavour. It was largely filmed in Northern Ireland, and has a predominantly British-based cast. “It’s hard to say why fantasy has come to have a British accent,” says David Benioff, one of the series’s co-creators. “But so many of the classic fantasy authors, such as Tolkien and CS Lewis, are English, and this world of Westeros, of castles, banners and jousts, is very much borrowed from European history.”

One notable non-Brit is Peter Dinklage (The Chronicles of Narnia), who steals scenes as the hilarious, acid-tongued Tyrion Lannister.

DB Weiss, who spent five years developing Game of Thrones with Benioff, says that his first task was to dispel the widespread misconception that fantasy was for geeks. “There is a Hollywood perception that fantasy is just for 12- to 15-year-old boys,” he says. “Convincing people that isn’t the case was part of the challenge.” But to HBO’s credit, they got it. “HBO saw the human element, the mature, adult stories involved, and they understood why it would make great television.”

Many of the more “mature and adult” scenes (there is noticeably more sex in Game of Thrones than in the relatively family-friendly Lord of the Rings) are supplied by Princess Daenerys Targaryen, who has been married off by her brother in a tactical alliance.

Daenerys is played by 23-year-old newcomer Emilia Clarke, who along with Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) and other younger members of the cast makes the action seem even easier on the eye.

In fact, rather than being compared to Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones has more in common with an HBO drama that also took a fantastical subject and made it sexy and credible: True Blood. It will be intriguing to see if Game of Thrones can do for fantasy what that drama did for vampires.