Iwan Rheon
How does a nice young Welshman with beguiling blue eyes and an impish face make such a convincing psychopath?
The answer, says Iwan Rheon, lies in looking beyond the baddie.
As Game of Thrones’ murderous Ramsay Bolton – the kind of sadist who cuts off a victim’s most intimate appendage, then casually chomps a sausage in front of him – Rheon’s ability to capture an almost childlike delight in his depraved deeds won him widespread acclaim.
So brilliantly chilling was his performance, in fact, that his mum couldn’t watch the show.
‘When I went to read for Ramsay, they said “You have to find the joy in him”, because he really relishes this – he’s not just evil and “Rargh!”,’ growls the 33-year-old. ‘He’s a young man who’s having fun.
‘He loves it. That was the key to the character, and I built him around that.’
Taking a character beyond what’s expected seems to come naturally to Rheon, the son of an auditor father and social worker mother from Cardiff, who became spellbound by drama aged just 3.
‘It’s probably one of my earliest memories. My dad did amateur dramatics, and I went to see him playing St David, and I remember being confused and excited by this. What are they doing? Why are they all shouting? What’s going on? And my mum having to tell me to shut up.
‘That idea of make-believe, where you can transport your imagination and create something that everyone can get absorbed in, was very attractive to me as a kid. I’m dyslexic, so I found academic stuff hard; I was always better at expressing myself doing something creative.’
Rheon’s break came aged 17 when Bethan Jones, then producer of the BBC’s Welsh language soap Pobol y Cwm, spotted him at a performance festival.
His year on the soap was, he says, ‘an amazing apprenticeship. The turnaround is so fast, so I could watch myself straight away and I’d be like “Oh my god, that’s awful”, and I’d learn. It taught me to turn up knowing what you’ve got to do, because there’s no time to mess around. It was very, very valuable.’
One day Jones pulled Rheon into her office: ‘I thought I was in trouble! But she said “You could stay here and have a good life, but I think maybe you should go to drama school.”
He took her advice. Wisely, it turned out: after studying at LAMDA, in 2009 Rheon played a troubled teen in the musical Spring Awakening – and bagged himself an Olivier Award.
‘That was a good day,’ he says, laughing. ‘I really didn’t expect to win it. Obviously people always say that, but I was up against Sheila Hancock and Maureen Lipman! I was just over the moon to be nominated, so it was a real surprise.’
The angsty youth theme was ramped up a notch when Rheon played introverted oddball Simon in E4’s BAFTA-winning comedy drama Misfits. To begin with his character rarely spoke, which presented something of a challenge, ‘but although it would be very easy just to fade into the background, the director encouraged me to be[italics] in every scene. That was a really good lesson: you don’t need to have all the lines, but you have to be present.’
From there he was catapulted into fantasy behemoth Game of Thrones as the depraved Ramsay Bolton, ‘which was challenging in a completely different way to Misfits, in that he had all the lines!
‘He was a complete extrovert and enjoying himself thoroughly in whatever dark thing he was doing, so it was fun to play in that sense.
‘The writing is so good on that show, and every season I’d get one massive scene with a load of amazing dialogue, and I’d really relish it. And then every season there was always one that I’d go “Oh, god, I can’t do this”. Particularly the rape of Sansa. That was really difficult for everyone.’
Rheon admits he didn’t sleep the night before filming the scene, in which Ramsay attacks his 15-year-old bride (played by Sophie Turner). ‘It’s one thing doing things that are completely outrageous to even consider doing as a normal human being, and then there’s something like that, which is just so close to the bone,’ he explains.
‘It happens in the world today, and because you knew how young she is, it was just horrible to have to do. But Sophie was so mature and dealt with it very well. She probably dealt with it better than the rest of us.’
When the cameras stopped rolling, he and Sophie went out for a quiet dinner and a game of pool, ‘so we shook it all off together. That’s really important.’
Since Ramsay Bolton’s suitably grisly death at the jaws of his own starving dogs, Rheon hasn’t been short of screen roles, but he’s currently treading the West End boards in dystopian thriller Foxfinder.
He plays the eponymous lead, a ‘priest-slash-Gestapo’ government official in a bleak re-imagining of Britain: with closed borders and a total reliance on state-owned agriculture, it’s a nation struggling to survive.
‘There’s flooding, the crops are failing, and everything’s blamed on the fox, so they send in the Foxfinder to figure out why things are going wrong,’ he explains. ‘I’d been looking for the right play, and this is fantastic. It’s unnerving, and questioning everything about our society. It really is pretty special.’
Foxfinder runs until January, but whether stage, film or TV entices Rheon next remains to be seen. ‘I’ll be happy just to keep working, to be honest,’ he says. ‘I get to do something that I really enjoy, which I’m so grateful for. I get to go to fun places, use my imagination and play lots of very different types of people. It never stays the same, which is really exciting. I'm very lucky.’
Foxfinder, Ambassador’s Theatre, London, until January 5.
IWAN-NA KNOW MORE
Rheon is an accomplished folk-pop musician whose debut album, Dinard, is named after the town in Brittany where he met his girlfriend Zoe Grisedale. Their first child was born last month.
Other TV appearances include Grandma’s House, Riviera, Our Girl, Vicious, Inhumans, and playing a young Adolph Hitler in Sky’s Urban Myths. ‘It really good fun. This was before his political ambitions, when he wanted to be an artist. He was a very confused, weird young man.’
He stars alongside Mel Gibson’s son Milo in Hurricane, the true story of the RAF’s Polish pilots in World War Two (at cinemas now). ‘It was tricky because I had to speak in Polish for a lot of the film, but it’s a really interesting and important story.’
The bard beckons: Rheon wants to ‘have a pop at a big Shakespeare play. I’d love to play Iago in Othello.’
An edited version of this feature ran in Waitrose Weekend in September 2018. (c) Waitrose