Sean Bean’s five greatest death scenes, according to Sean Bean
There are three things Sean Bean loves about everything else; Yorkshire; not walking into Mordor; and dying in movies.
It has been a long-running gag that, if the Brit is in a film, he’s going to die, and usually in some horrific fashion. Nobody knows why this keeps happening to him – maybe he did something really bad in a past life – but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy this trend in all its macabre glory.
According to a list compiled by the good folks over at Screen Rant, the Beanster has died in a whopping 24 different movies and TV shows. Other estimates put this number even higher, but as I can’t be bothered to sit down and watch everything he’s ever been in, we’ll just have to accept an estimate. That’s a lot of deaths, to the point where it would be almost impossible to pick a favourite. As it turns out, according to an interview with Little White Lies, Bean couldn’t pick one favourite, so he picked five instead.
First up is an absolute classic of the Bean-death genre. In the 2010 film Black Death, he plays a bishop’s envoy called Ulric, who visits a monastery during the time of plague. When he upsets the locals, he is sentenced to a cruel and painful death – torn apart by horses. “I don’t think anyone was quite sure how we were going to do it up until the day,” Bean revealed. “We had all these ideas about using horses and ropes, but it’s not till you actually get on set that you think, ‘OK, how am I going to die?’”
Up next is a death that Bean has called his favourite in other interviews. As Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings, the star dies fighting hordes of Uruk-hai, protecting Frodo and the one ring after very nearly succumbing to its charms. “Peter [Jackson] spent quite a bit of time on that particular death,” Bean revealed. “Choreographing every detail and planning how he was going to film parts of it in slow motion and what music he was going to use.” All that effort paid off, as it’s one of the most emotional parts of the entire trilogy.
“Poor Tadgh McCabe,” said Bean of his character in the 1990 film, The Field. “It’s such a sad scene, but also quite pathetic because he just can’t get away.” McCabe is the son of an Irish farmer (played by Richard Harris) whose life unravels when the field he rents goes up for auction. Tadgh, a naïve man who doesn’t always act in his father’s best interests, meets a sticky end when he is driven off a cliff by a herd of stampeding cattle. As deaths go, it’s one of the most unique in movie history.
Bean’s death in Patriot Games – a film that Quentin Tarantino hated, by the way – was fourth, which came about during a fight with Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan. Bean’s character, an IRA terrorist named Sean Miller, dies when Ryan shoves him down onto an anchor. It’s pretty gnarly.
Finally, Bean selected his demise in the 2002 sci-fi film Equilibrium. In a world where human emotions are suppressed by drugs, Bean’s character, Errol Partridge, goes against this edict by saving a book of W. B. Yeats’ poetry from a fire. When an enforcer played by Christian Bale catches him reading it, he executes him at point-blank range. “I’ve still got the book at home with the bullet hole in it,” Bean admitted.
