Madden talks facing down sub-zero temperatures and raging rapids for his new show.

Game of Thrones was a warm-up for what I had to go through on this.

Richard Madden may have endured some serious hardships as Robb Stark, king of the North, on HBO’s fantasy juggernaut, but the Scottish actor told Digital Spy that the icy conditions of Winterfell were a breeze compared to what he experienced on new mini-series Klondike.

Madden plays adventurer Bill Haskell in the three-parter. The first ever drama from the Discovery Channel, Klondike is the tale of “warriors” who faced harsh conditions, dangerous characters and unthinkable odds in the Last Great Gold Rush of the 1890s.

“It was terrifying,” Madden says of recreating the Rush, an experience that saw him exposed to Alberta, Canada’s sub-zero temperatures and raging rapids.

“I convinced myself that I was in a studio and we would just turn off the rapids if it got dangerous,” he laughs. “Because otherwise I wouldn’t have gone in there!

“It was a leap of faith – you just do it. There’s no safe way to control nature. That’s very much the story of this piece – that nature will do what it wants and you just have to try and best it.”

Madden admits that he thought three seasons on Game of Thrones would prepare him for a tough shoot on Klondike – and also admits that he was very, very wrong.

“I thought, ‘I’ve done Game of Thrones – it doesn’t get harder than that’. There were days on that show when I was freezing cold and I couldn’t feel my feet…

“But the second day on the Klondike set, I got frostbite on my face and thought… this is going to be a bit harder than Game of Thrones, isn’t it?

“There were days on Klondike where I’d have nosebleeds because I was just so physically exhausted at altitude. Some days, I’d have to lie down and roll in the mud, because it was easier and quicker than for costume and make-up to put [fake mud] on.

“But you shouldn’t ever be doing things that are easy – if they’re easy to do, then they’re not really going to be pushing you or driving you forward, so what’s the point?”

Despite the difficult shoot, Madden insists that he is proud of Klondike – a tale of one man’s heroism and endurance that the 27-year-old actor bills as a “study of humanity”.

“It was so intense at Klondike – life and death all the time – and I kept expecting people to stab each other in the back, to destroy each other.

“Instead, what I found at every turn was this man Bill Haskell, who – faced with the worst things in the world – always chose the good options.”

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