“I’m pissed off”: Sean Bean was furious at his screen time being cut short in a rare movie he didn’t die in
Who doesn’t love a bit of Sean Bean? Whether you like him from his days as Sharpe, his numerous Hollywood triumphs, or his recent foray into bird-based podcasting, the gravel-voiced star has done very well for himself, but mostly why we love him so much is that he dies all the time.
The Yorkshire boy has starred in a litany of extraordinary death scenes across his career, to the point where audiences feel a little short-changed if he makes it to the end of a film.
From having his head lopped off in Game of Thrones to falling off a giant satellite in Goldeneye to being driven off a cliff by a herd of sheep in The Field, Bean has died in just about every conceivable fashion for our pleasure. Sometimes his characters do live to tell the tale, but this isn’t always the best decision.
In an interview with Digital Spy, Bean was asked if there were any of his characters that had perished that he wished had survived, and while he didn’t directly answer the question, he told an interesting story about a movie that wasn’t in nearly as much as he would have liked.
“I did a thing called Ronin. It was a really good character that I created…and he just went off…after about a third of the film. And then when it came out, everybody said, ‘Ah, you should have been in it longer’, and the director, John Frankenheimer, said, ‘I wish we would have kept you in longer…wouldn’t it have been great if Sean had been in it longer?’… and I said, ‘Yeah, it fucking would. I’m pissed off’.”
Released in 1998, Ronin follows the efforts of a group of ex-government agents from across the globe to steal a mysterious briefcase that has fallen into the wrong hands, for which a number of big names came together to work for the legendary Frankenheimer.
Robert de Niro (who swore he’d never return to France again after bad experiences filming there), Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgård, and Jonathan Swift are just some of the stars to lend their weight to this all-out romp. The film was praised for its slick action sequences and car chases, which influenced everything from the Mission: Impossible films to the Burnout series of video games.
Bean plays a character named Spence, a former arms specialist with links to the SAS, who is revealed to be a fraud after he clashes with De Niro’s character. He is let go from the team, and his fate is unknown, but this decision was taken because Frankenheimer wasn’t sure what he wanted to happen to him. He considered killing the character off, which would have been very apt, or having him kidnapped by the team’s IRA backers, yet ultimately, he let him walk away seemingly unharmed.
Ronin is still an excellent movie even without the consistent presence of Bean, and while his character provides a fascinating break in the narrative and casts doubt on the rest of the crew’s ability to finish the mission, if he had been killed, it would have been fine too, but it’s nice that the pattern can be broken from time to time.
