Ramsay Bolton of ‘Game of Thrones’ Is the Most Hated Man on TV
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Version 0 of 1. BEVERLY HILLS, CALIF. — Like many successful actors, Iwan Rheon, better known as the blithely malicious Ramsay Bolton on “Game of Thrones,” arguably the most hated man on television, admits he’s concerned about being narrowly defined by an indelible character. But ask a logical follow-up question — what else are you working on? — and the scale of his challenge becomes clear. “I’m playing a young Hitler,” he replied, referring to the British television movie “Adolf the Artist.” Then realization took hold, and his face crumpled in mock despair: “Oh, I’m typecast already!” Such is life for the man behind a character who, over three seasons on “Game of Thrones,” returning Sunday on HBO, has become the emblem of a disquieting show’s darkest impulses. Since arriving as a one-note sadist in Season 3, this striving, legitimized former bastard has expanded to both embody the story’s dynastic obsession and inflict some of its most flagrant abuses. That list includes the flaying and gelding of rivals, the recreational hunting of a girl and, most controversial, last season’s wedding-night rape of his hostage bride, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner). That he does it all with schoolboy glee makes him that much more viscerally loathsome — Mr. Rheon conceived Ramsay as a mash-up of Heath Ledger’s unhinged Joker and Dennis the Menace, he said, and added a bit of the swagger of Liam Gallagher, the dyspeptic former Oasis singer. The resulting confection has landed on many “most-hated” lists online. In December, readers of The Atlantic voted Ramsay “the actual worst character on television” over the likes of Hannibal Lecter and Walter White, as well as Joffrey Baratheon, the sneering boy-king Ramsay replaced as the signature “Game of Thrones” villain. “After we lost Joffrey, we had a psychopath-shaped hole in the ‘Thrones’ world,” Ms. Turner wrote in an email. “But Iwan brings a terror and a creepiness that Joffrey never had. We needed someone to hate, and we love to hate him.” In the new season, the show’s sixth, Ramsay deepens further, Mr. Rheon suggested, even approaching something like human emotion in mourning a girlfriend killed in the Season 5 finale. “That surprised even me,” he said. Of course, it also finds him seething over last season’s escape of his captives Sansa and Theon (Alfie Allen) — the young nobleman he castrated, forced into servitude and renamed Reek — and sets up who may be his most appalling victim yet: an as-yet-unborn half-sibling who could be a competing heir. [ “Game of Thrones” has moved past its blueprint. That’s a good thing. ] The show’s creators, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, so obsessed with secrecy this season they’ve declined to offer critics advance screener copies, will say only that Ramsay will be up to “very bad things.” “Sometimes you just think, ‘Oh God, can’t we just do something nice?’” Mr. Rheon said, laughing. “On this show, the heroes aren’t necessarily standard heroes, so I guess your villains need to be even worse.” Mr. Rheon, 30, wears the most-hated mantle easily. By all accounts a charming young Welshman — his name is pronounced OO-wan re-OHN, and he grew up in Cardiff and now lives in London — he is amused by the notoriety and claims it is “an honor” to be considered the most despicable thing on a show full of despicable things. “Apparently I’m scarier than a White Walker. And a giant. And a dragon,” he said. In general, fans don’t hold Ramsay’s actions against him, and the technical realities of production keep the vile deeds from weighing too heavily on his soul. Flayings, for example, involve a piece of rubber and a prop knife he has to hold just so for the light to catch its malevolent angles, making it hard to obsess over the moral dimensions. One exception was Sansa’s rape last season, which “was very difficult to me; I couldn’t really sleep the night before,” he said. Like others on the show, however, he remains somewhat perplexed by the outrage it sparked, less by the anger itself than by the scale and selective nature of it. A few episodes later, he noted, the immolation of a little girl drew a comparatively muted response. “I don’t want to compare these things and which is worse,” he said. “But burning a child at the stake? That’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” [ Sign up for our newsletter and get expert TV and movie recommendations twice a week ] For a man known for onscreen villainy, Mr. Rheon could hardly be more off-brand in conversation. Self-deprecating and solicitous, he is given to wisecracks and silly tangents — asked his own favorite screen scoundrels, he listed Stringer Bell from “The Wire” and the T. rex from “Jurassic Park.” Perhaps most jarring for “Thrones” fans: He spends his spare time writing and recording folk-pop tunes, mostly on his own but occasionally with his brother, Aled. Last year he released his first album, “Dinard.” “He’s just a really nice fellow,” said Mr. Allen, the target of Ramsay’s most gruesome depredations. “I couldn’t put a finger on why he makes a good psychopath.” (The actors, friends off camera, occasionally encounter incredulous fans who are stunned to see them spending time together. “It’s like, do you believe in dragons, too, mate?” Mr. Allen said.) In person, removed from the dank interiors he typically haunts on “Game of Thrones,” Mr. Rheon’s face is more cherubic than demonic, with a rakish scruff and artfully tousled hair that gets more so as he runs his hands through it in conversation. What defines him, though, are a pair of arresting pale blue eyes that tend to bulge maniacally on “Game of Thrones,” alight with the delight that comes from some cruelty or another. “He has this stare, this wide-eyed smiling gaze that pierces right through you,” Ms. Turner said. Born in Carmarthen, Mr. Rheon and his family moved to Cardiff when he was 5, and he grew up playing in punk bands and dreaming of rock stardom. But participation in the Eisteddfod, a major culture festival in Wales, led to him being cast in a Welsh soap opera, and he went on to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His breakthrough role came not long after he graduated, as the suicidal Moritz in a 2009 London production of the musical “Spring Awakening.” The role was one of the first of many troubled, tormented or otherwise odd folks he’d be hired to play. He was an awkward juvenile delinquent in “Misfits,” a skewed superhero series in Britain; an erratic drug dealer in the film “Wild Bill”; and a traumatized soldier in the BBC war drama “Our Girl.” (An exception: his gig as the earnest neighbor to Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi on the British sitcom “Vicious.”) For “Game of Thrones,” Mr. Rheon originally auditioned for the role of the heroic (and theoretically dead) Jon Snow, which instead went to Kit Harington. But his talent and versatility kept him “on our radar,” Mr. Benioff and Mr. Weiss wrote in a joint email; he joined the show as Ramsay in Season 3. “The spark of humanity that Iwan occasionally provides makes all the other stuff that much more terrifying.” Ramsay’s season-long torture of Theon tested viewers’ patience, but he acquired texture as it became clear that he’s fueled by a toxic cocktail of adoration and resentment toward his father, Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton). The combination of “the little boy and the psychopath” makes Ramsay “more than a cardboard cutout evil baddie,” Mr. McElhatton said. It also situates him firmly within the brutal, multigenerational cycle of legacy and revenge that makes “Game of Thrones” go — even if the actor still isn’t sure why he fits in so well. “I’ve been trying to figure out what it is, but it’s so difficult to objectively look at why you get cast as all these strange people,” Mr. Rheon said. “The big eyes, maybe.” “But,” he added, “I’m not complaining.” |