SINGAPORE — Coming off the wintry Game Of Thrones set in Belfast, Isaac Hempstead Wright is finding Singapore so hot that he empathises with Inuka the polar bear.
The 17-year-old English actor, who plays Bran Stark, is in town to promote the sixth season of the hit HBO series; and visiting the Singapore Zoo was one of the things he did on his first visit here.
“They had a polar bear there! He must be boiling!” he exclaimed. “I was asking people, ‘How cold can it get here?’ and they were like, ‘It can sometimes get as low as 26°C!’ Like, ‘what?’”
Of course, no visit to Singapore would be complete without munching on some local chow. “I’ve eaten lots of food: Char kway teow, claypot rice … You guys eat a lot, as well!”
Bran, who is crippled but has the ability to “warg” (to enter others’ minds and control their actions), sat out the last season, but is set to return older and wiser.
“The idea is that he has been honing his magical powers,” he said.
But while Bran could become one of the story’s most important characters, it is clear that Hempstead Wright has the cushiest job on set: Thanks to his character’s condition, he never has to get up, much less stand on his own two feet.
Hempstead Wright spent earlier seasons being carried around on Hodor’s back; now that he has grown quite tall though “we’d look ridiculous”, he said, so he spends much of the season bundled up in his cave.
“There was a point last season when everyone else had been standing up all day and they were (stretching), their backs hurt so much, and I was just lying down,” he guffawed. “I’m always in this little sledge and it has got all this nice fur and blankets, so I was just really warm the whole time.”
It can get so comfortable that Hempstead Wright admitted he has fallen asleep on set. But not while the cameras were rolling, right? “Uh, there might have been one scene where I was supposed to be warging and I was asleep,” he said, laughing.
“Sometimes — this is such a first-world problem — you can be sitting in an awkward position and it can really hurt. But in general, I have it pretty easy compared to everyone else. I suppose there are dream sequences where I’m walking about, and it’s always nice, having done those, to be able to go and sit down again. It’s like, ‘this is my job.’”
But the cushier the job, the more one fears losing it, perhaps — especially on a show like Game Of Thrones, where characters are unceremoniously killed off left, right and centre.
“Everyone is dispensable,” Hempstead Wright agreed. “The first thing anyone does whenever they get the script is to flip through to check that they’re still alive. It’s an eternal worry that we’re going to lose our stable employment every year.”
One thing’s for sure: He will never find another job like this. If he moves on to do another show, he’ll say: “Well, I’m only doing sitting-down parts, just to let you know.”
