Guard Everything
Confession — I never liked Rob Stark. He annoyed me because I always thought he got in the way of me getting to know Jon Snow more. He was an inevitability, a hurdle you had to overcome to get to what you really wanted. Cinderella didn’t help either. Cinderella has the biggest castle of all of the Disney characters and not even that could move me to like Richard Madden. I wrote him off.
When I saw the commercial for The Bodyguard, I was interested and then I realized who was the lead and I thought, “Fuck Rob Stark, I’m not going to watch this.” Netflix kept on recommending it so I finally buckled and started episode one.
From the moment it opened in that train I was hooked. At one point, I thought, “Where the hell has Richard Madden been this whole time?”
He’s a vet with PTSD and he works as a bodyguard for high-profile clients. I don’t follow politics and I don’t pay attention when they explain the small print, but he was guarding a woman that was important, her position made military decisions and a lot of people wanted her dead.
He’s protective, smart, hot, and has a Scottish accent. Obviously, they were going to fall for each other. What I did not see coming is what they would do with her character and what would happen to him for the remaining episodes.
At one point he has a bomb strapped to his body and there are guns pointed at him by an entire police force of people that are really stupid. I’ve talked about people being aggressively stupid and how they don’t belong on this planet. Imagine have C-4 strapped around your body and you have to prove to the aggressively stupid that you have been framed by the top politicians in your country. It was sticky to the say the least.
I don’t know if this was supposed to be a single season, but I would come back if they created an additional season for this character. He has layers. The trauma from the war, his drinking problem, the ghosts he has accumulated in his life — this is the type of character I would have wanted Julia Roberts to meet in Homecoming.
I’m rooting for Richard Madden and I wouldn’t mind seeing him in more shows and films. He has to be this character though. I have a different take now. I think he had to play less than as Rob Stark so we wouldn’t get attached to him. He had to be stupid so we could concentrate on Jon Snow. He was sexy in The Bodyguard, maybe Disney said that was too much for Cinderella so he purposely had to be granola for that as well.
I don’t care how we got here, but we are here now. Richard Madden gets our attention and his work is worth watching.
