Richard Madden News•All rights reserved to its owners
Golden Globe-winning star of Bodyguard, Richard Madden, told The Hollywood Reporter’s Drama Actor Roundtable he found himself “physically and mentally exhausted” at the end of filming the BBC series. “I need to stop. I need to stop doing this for a while,” Madden thought, after playing a veteran suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
“It weighed very heavy on me,” the actor told the roundtable. “You spend more time in someone else’s clothes, saying someone else’s words, thinking someone else’s thoughts. You do lose a bit of yourself.”
“I’m not a method actor in any way, but you get a huge hangover from this,” he continued. “At the end of this, I felt very isolated and broken, much like the character was.”
To prepare for the role, Madden “spoke to a few soldiers,” but confessed it was “tough, because they really don’t want to talk about it. People don’t want to discuss this at all.”
PTSD “is something that people live with everyday,” said the Scottish actor and former Game of Thrones star. “It can be a really trickling level of anxiety you constantly live with, or paranoia, or panic attacks.” Madden said his goal as an actor was “to humanize [PTSD] within someone who is in complete denial about it.”