Sean Bean names his ultimate guilty pleasure movie: “I like really silly things”
You might think you know Sean Bean’s guilty pleasure if you’ve heard the hottest news in the acting world recently, and you’d be right if you guessed that the man is an avid birder and is even taking over the GetBirding podcast as host for the next season.
But seemingly, Bean doesn’t feel too guilty for his love of birds, or gardening, or any of the other numerous wholesome hobbies he seems to have in his repertoire, and when it comes to films, he admits that he likes them on the much less serious side.
“I like really silly things,” he told The Independent, “Like Dumb and Dumber”.
It’s difficult to imagine the actor who played the honourable and stoic Ned Stark, or the valiant Boromir, sitting back and laughing his ass off at a Jim Carrey flick, especially this one. The 1994 film is a ridiculous buddy road movie following, you guessed it, two incredibly dumb friends who get into a bunch of high jinks.
Then again, as is clear with his love of birds, the avian kind, although he has been married five times, and tending to his garden, it’s clear Bean is a man of simple pleasures. Just like the kind of characters he gravitates towards, the actor is a man of few words, with interviewers often remarking on his bashfulness.
According to him, he’s “not surrounded by comedy in his life”, whether he means personally or the kings of grim-faced characters he takes on is not clear, but comedies help to lighten the load, and apparently, so do “gangster films”, because what quiet man from the North doesn’t unwind with one?
Scorsese’s Goodfellas is one of the most precisely crafted pieces of cinema, showing a director at his most confident. Hell, the two-and-a-half-minute tracking ‘Copa shot’ is considered one of the best in film history and popularised those long steadicam shots we’re so used to these days.
And then there’s The Godfather, which, pardon the truly awful pun, was the godfather of all modern gangster movies. It was one of the first to actually steep itself in the culture it was depicting and do it in a way that was more than simple action. Without it, we wouldn’t have Goodfellas or The Sopranos.
It would almost be a crime to place Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpieces in the realm of guilty pleasures, as not all gangster movies are made equal, and these two certainly come out ahead of the rest, not even just of those in the genre, but of most movies in general.
So, really, all of this is to say: Sean Bean has taste. Nothing to feel guilty about here. Well, maybe Dumb and Dumber, but I’ll let it slide.
