Still Sharp: Sean Bean is The Rake's Issue 102 Cover Star

Maybe it’s the echo in the empty bar area where I’m waiting to meet him, on the sixth floor of White City House in the former BBC headquarters in west London. Or more likely it’s because he’s a trained — and fiercely dedicated — actor that Sean Bean’s distinctive Yorkshire brogue rings out as soon as the lift doors open and he emerges, chatting with one of his press team.

Whatever age you are, whatever your popular culture preferences, whatever part of the English-speaking world you’re reading this in, his is a voice you’ll be familiar with. Rich in warmth and cadence, it’s one so infectious it makes this writer, who hails from the London- Essex overlap, wish he had a right to use a ‘t’ and an apostrophe in place of the third word in the title of J.R.R. Tolkien’s magnum opus and pronounce the word ‘thrones’ with a fixed, round-lipped vowel sound.

Bean strolls across the room and introduces himself with an exuberant extension of the hand and a thousand-kilowatt smile that will remain in place for most of an interview that unfolds following a brief inspection, through a corner window, of the damage done to the building by a fire the week before.

Bean — his hair these days tickling the silk collars of a shirt he’s wearing beneath a dark, elegantly tailored suit — has reason to be on cheerful form. A globally renowned superstar of the screen (silver and small), in huge part thanks to the two projects alluded to above — playing Boromir in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Eddard ‘Ned’ Stark in the first season of HBO’s cultural juggernaut Game of Thrones — he can cherry-pick parts these days based entirely on his creative inclinations. And his latest vehicle is a passion project that has him talking with the intensity and fervour we’ve all seen beamed into our living rooms so often.

A gritty family drama by the name of Anemone, it co-stars Daniel Day-Lewis, enticed out of his eight-year acting hiatus by the involvement of his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, who directs and has co- written the film with his three-time Oscar-winning father. Daniel and Sean play two estranged brothers haunted by their past as British paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, reconnecting in the woods where Day-Lewis’s character is living as a hermit. Generational trauma and family bonds are among the themes explored, and the chemistry between the two leading men takes cinematic intensity to new levels (particularly in a scene involving Day-Lewis’s recollections of an incident with a priest, to which we could never do justice with words here).

“Whether Anemone is to everyone’s taste, I’m not quite sure,” Bean says. “But I think admirers of independent films and arthouse cinema will love it. It has almost a European feel to it. I love French and German films, and this kind of subject matter certainly appeals to me. And I think many others want to see something a bit more profound in today’s cinema, rather than going for entertainment that’s like playing a video game. This is a deep, profound, disturbing personal drama, especially between the two brothers and also Nessa — Samantha Morton’s character.”

Whether Anemone is to everyone's taste, I'm not sure. But others want something profound in today's cinema.

Would modest audience figures — for a man who, as well as starring in The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, portrayed Bond villain Alec Trevelyan in 1995’s GoldenEye and appeared in mega-blockbusters such as National Treasure (2004) and The Martian (2015) — bother him? “Well, the beauty of this, in terms of audience figures, is that Daniel Day-Lewis is the main part, and everybody wants to see his return. He’s come out of retirement after [eight] years to work with his son, and so the studio and all of us are in the fortunate position that you can make what is essentially a studio film but more like a small independent film with that kind of grittiness to it.

“I also recently filmed [the upcoming biographical drama] The Yellow Tie, about a musician, a composer, in Bucharest. It’s really good. It reminds me of the Merchant Ivory films — A Room With a View and so on — in the eighties. But I think audience tastes have shifted since then, unfortunately, because if it had come out at that time, it would have been very well received. Nevertheless, it’s a really good piece of work. But whether it gets distribution, whether people pick it up and put the money out to be able to show it in cinemas, is another matter."

What of Bean’s pursuits outside his main creative medium? Google a clip of him on The Jonathan Ross Show with Michelle Keegan and Liam Gallagher (well worth it for the anecdotes about receiving fan mail meant for Mr. Bean — “You make me laugh so much with your rubbery face”), and you’ll see him expound on landscaping his three or so acres of garden at the home he shares with his fifth wife, Ashley Moore, in Frome, Somerset.

Devotees of Bean’s more swashbuckling performances — a niche he carved out across 15 years from the early 1990s, when he played the eponymous fictional British soldier Sharpe in the historical drama based on Bernard Cornwell’s novels about the Napoleonic wars — will want to tune into another project Bean has been working on of late, this one for television: a treatment of Robin Hood starring Jack Patten in the title role and with Bean as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Also starring Lauren McQueen as Marian, it’s a more historically authentic treatment of the subject than those afforded to the folkloric hero in the past.

Read the full story in Issue 102, available now.

The first two episodes of Robin Hood premiere on MGM+ on November 2nd.
Original Gangsters starts on November 4th at 9pm on Sky History and History Play.
Anemone will be in cinemas from November 7th.

Grooming: Amanda Grossman using Sam McKnight and ILIA Beauty 
Fashion Assistant: Elena Garcia
Photography Team: Isaak Hest and Pim Van Baalen
Special Thanks to The Chancery Rosewood