Sean Bean is sick of dying onscreen.
The 60-year-old actor is so fed up with his alter-egos meeting untimely deaths onscreen – including being beheaded in ‘Game of Thrones’ and killed by arrows in ‘Lord of the Rings’ – that Sean is now rejecting all roles that end in his character’s death.
He told The Sun newspaper: "I’ve turned down stuff. I’ve said, ‘They know my character’s going to die because I’m in it!’ I just had to cut that out and start surviving, otherwise it was all a bit predictable.
"I did do one job and they said, ‘We’re going to kill you’, and I was like, ‘Oh no!’ and then they said, ‘Well, can we injure you badly?’ and I was like, ‘OK, so long as I stay alive this time’.
"I’ve played a lot of baddies, they were great but they weren’t very fulfilling – and I always died."
And Sean admitted he is still upset about his character Ned Stark being killed in season one of ‘Game of Thrones’.
He explained: "I’d read the ‘Game Of Thrones’ books and they said to me, ‘You do die in this, but it’s near the end of the series’. And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, fair enough’.
‘So they made it very clear at the time I was going to die, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to get stuck in one of these series that lasts seven years’.
‘But I wish I’d have got stuck now! But it was very clear what George RR Martin wanted to happen to Ned – and it did."
And Sean has seen his co-stars, including Sophie Turner who played his daughter Sansa, go on to become huge stars.
He said: "They’re bigger stars than me. They were so much younger at the time as it was eight years ago, but now you see them in Vogue and all these magazines. It’s a fairytale come true."