Sean Bean: 'I'd rather play a great character who dies than a mundane character who lives'

Yet there, bang in the middle of the action, hair slicked back from that millstone-grit face and a pistol tucked down his slacks, is one of the most famous Yorkshiremen alive, Sean Bean. He plays Ronnie Phelan, the head of a clan of cocaine-importing Merseyside gangsters and, as you might expect, he’s fantastic.

Bean long ago mastered the art of bending roles to his own personality, so it’s no surprise that Phelan – who crossed the Pennines, cornered the Liverpool drug market, married a local girl and started a crime dynasty – is also from Sheffield.

“I came from a background that wasn’t into acting and all that palaver,” says Bean, the son of a steel fabricator. “But my ambition was just to get on stage and do something, no matter how small. To show people what I could do. Not in a big-headed way, though I guess there was a bit of that.”

He managed it, via a welding course at Rotherham College, then Rada – possibly a unique career progression – before giving the 1990s some of its best big-screen baddies, while always looking to improve and move on. “When I started off, I was good at playing villains, 006 in Bond [GoldenEye] and then Patriot Games. You get typecast but you can’t complain about it, you just try and branch out in different ways.”

Branching out brought worldwide fame, thanks to Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones. But recent bravura television performances in Jimmy McGovern and Helen Black’s Time, McGovern’s Broken – both of which won Bean a BAFTA – and now Stephen Butchard’s This City Is Ours, feel like the work that everything else has been leading to. The 65-year-old Bean, I suggest, has achieved a ripe creative maturity.

“You make me sound like an apple!” he laughs, a big man sequestered in a small corporate interview room, a little embarrassed by the praise. “It’s just about the truth, really,” he says. “The truth, reality and authenticity. I’ve come to realise that they’re the salient points, and they make me tick.”

For much of the time since his 1990s portrayal of Napoleonic-era soldier Richard Sharpe, the on-screen Bean has been at war with the world. Who else has an online meme consisting entirely of him saying the word “bastard”? Who else could have inspired a social media campaign – #dontkillseanbean – because he died so often in films? “I realised there were quite a lot of deaths without anybody needing to tell me,” he says of that campaign.

“It was obvious. But I was playing some great characters, juicy, nasty pieces of work, and I thought I’d rather play them and die than play a mundane character that lives. But it came to a point with all the memes and I thought, ‘Maybe I should stop dying as much.’ But it doesn’t bother me any more. And, you know, I’m not really dead!”

I’ve been told he doesn’t like to dwell on this subject or talk about his family, but rather than the walled-up north countryman I half feared, Bean, amused and unassuming in equal amounts, is open about the course he’s taken: “Getting older means you learn to respect your life a little more; not get too excited about petty things. I do still get pissed off now and again, but those times are few and far between.”

So where does this relaxed, mature Sean Bean draw his screen rage from? “I’ve never really seen it as a problem to perform anger or distress. I can snap into that quite easily. We’ve all seen people, our family or friends, turning on a sixpence, going into a rage; it’s shocking and something you always remember.”

That’s not to say, he avers, that the Bean family – father Brian, mother Rita and younger sister Lorraine, resident on a council estate but with plenty of food on the table – were at each other’s throats. “We weren’t always shouting and bawling, but we made our feelings clear. You cleared the air, and it was great. But it was a very loving family, and I’m thankful for that.”

Bean is still a little surprised, I sense, to have come this far. “It’s tough, this game,” he says, then gets up for mineral water, perhaps not quite as quickly as he used to. I’m reminded that, for an actor, navigating the journey from testosterone-filled hero to parts that accommodate those extra inches around the waist and inevitable softening of the jawline can be difficult. This, of course, is exactly the trick Bean pulled off as imprisoned middle-aged drink-driver Mark Cobden in Time.

“I’ve had some great roles and a varied career – I’m very grateful for that,” he says on his return, before revealing some advice he gave to his daughters when they considered going into acting: “You get to work on a job that you love but it’s a very temperamental and precarious job, and you really want to do it at the expense of all else.”

That absolute commitment to the craft might point to why Bean has been married five times (“I’m a romantic,” was the explanation he gave The Times in 2022). Those relationships have given him three daughters, Lorna, 37, and Molly, 33, with his second wife Melanie Hill and, Evie, 26, with his third wife Abigail Cruttenden.

Now that Bean, married to Ashley Moore since 2017, has young grandchildren, is he tempted by lighter projects, more whimsical things that they could watch? “Are you saying I can’t let my grandchildren watch anything I’ve been in?” he laughs. “I have done Percy Jackson & the Olympians and my two eldest, boys of seven and eight, might be ready for Lord of the Rings in a couple of years.”

The grandkids certainly won’t be watching This City is Ours, which is often brutal. “A gangster film without violence – it’s not going to run, is it?” he says. “But I think it’s done very authentically, which can be more distressing, more powerful. If it’s glamorised, it’s not so shocking. But I don’t like gratuitous violence and I don’t particularly like big fight scenes or battle scenes, people just being mowed down by machine guns recklessly.”

Bean’s character, Ronnie, plans to retire to Spain, but who will take over the business: his intellectually challenged son Jamie, played by Jack McMullen, or young lieutenant Michael, the linchpin of the firm’s deals with Colombian drug cartels, played by Liverpudlian actor James Nelson-Joyce? Things are further complicated when a huge shipment of cocaine goes missing at the docks. “These people experience euphoria and confidence because of the drugs riches they think are coming their way,” says Bean.

“And when they crash from that feeling I guess it’s like a comedown from drugs. They’ve got villas in Spain and money stashed away, but they’re living in fear. Ronnie can change in a flash, flare up in a split second, and that’s because of his instability and paranoia.”

Increasingly, that paranoia is directed at Nelson-Joyce’s Michael. The two actors have previous: Nelson-Joyce tried to set Bean’s feet on fire in a prison-cell scene in Time, though I think Bean might have forgiven him. “James is smashing,” he says. “I’ve got the greatest respect for him and faith that he’s going to be a big star. That day is not far away.”

Bean and Nelson-Joyce both have an authenticity rooted in the culture and sound of their respective cities, and Bean sees This City Is Ours and other northern, working-class TV series as “an antidote to RP [Received Pronunciation] dramas. It’s nice to see the other side, to get a more balanced view of how society is.”

Nelson-Joyce lives in Liverpool, but Bean and Moore have a home in rural Somerset. “It was accidental, really. I’d lived in London since drama school, and I just realised my girls had grown up and got married and were having kids,” he says. “I thought, ‘I don’t know what I’m really here for.’ Then Ashley saw this quirky little place in Somerset, with a lot of trees and water and land. I find it very relaxing, there’s nothing there, just the sound of birds and a stillness. It allows me to recharge my batteries, get rid of the detritus of the last part that might still be hanging around.”

Isn’t that a bit soft and, well, southern for the voice of Yorkshire Tea? “A younger me probably wouldn’t believe I’m in Somerset,” Bean says. “But he would have been overjoyed just to have got a foothold in the business.”

Does he still think of that younger, sometimes surly Sean, making his way down from the Steel City, burning to show the world what he can do? “If I think back to then and ask, ‘Why did I want to do this?’, it was because something spurred me on, something clicked inside me. And I’m still doing it, I have the same belief as I did then,” he looks straight into my eyes. “That’s the main thing to me.”

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This City Is Ours is available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Episodes air Sundays on BBC One.

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