Anna Daniels
Obviously, the big reason why Richard Madden left Game of Thrones is because his character was always meant to be murdered. The show was an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, the first of which is entitled A Game of Thrones. In the third book, A Storm of Swords, Robb is killed at the event known as the “Red Wedding.” While it’s not uncommon for TV and film adaptations to take creative liberties when translating the source material, Robb’s death was unavoidable.
That said, Madden didn’t protest leaving Game of Thrones. In a June 2019 installment of the Variety series “Actors on Actors,” Madden sat down with Academy Award-nominated actress Amy Adams and revealed that he was actually “thankful” that he was killed off Thrones early. Madden explained his gratitude by saying, “I died at the end of season 3. It was such a hard thing to finish because from first pilot to my death was five years. But five years was a great time to be on the show. It helped me so much with my career and experience. I learned a lot from shooting 30 hours of television.”
He then went on to praise the people who stuck out the entire series: “You really start to learn the trade doing that. And then I was thankful to leave it. The actors on it now must be 11 years into playing these characters. Give these guys some medals, because that is a marathon.”
Madden also expressed the desire to move on from the Robb Stark “type,” worried that he might be typecast going forward. “I’d like to explore things that are a bit not Romeo. I think I spent 10 years playing different versions of Romeo,” he said. “From Robb Stark to literally playing Romeo twice on stage, once when I was 21 and once when I was 30, I’ve played a lot of these good guys that bad things happen to.”
Written by: Looper
