If you thought Bran Stark was condescendingly distant the entire seventh season of Game of Thrones, it’s because he’s been on Mars. So much of his dialogue and mannerisms have been Jaden Smith-esque because actor Isaac Hempstead Wright channeled human deity and famous naked blue man Doctor Manhattan for the performance.
“We had a chat about how we wanted to play Bran this season, and [David Benioff and D.B. Weiss] suggested Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen comic,” Hempstead Wright told Vulture. Bran was slightly based on that, existing in all these different times at once, knowing all these various things, being this emotionless rock connecting these different timelines and the history of the universe.”
This is pretty obvious to any Watchmen fans who caught all of Bran’s latest shenanigans. His cool, detached, otherworldly demeanor is a perfect, polished mirror for how Dr. Jon Osterman responded to the world after he gained the ability to see into the past and future. Bran can’t build crystal structures out of Martian sand, but he can enter the brain space of ravens and dire wolves and door-holding humans (tissues, please), so it’s a fair trade.
The best thing about this bit of acting trivia is that Game of Thrones reached not into the deeper world of fantasy for a corollary, but into the realm of science fiction. It’s a knowing nod toward another titan of pop culture, and a clever bit of tissue that connects the moral struggle in Westeros to an apathetic superhero crafted by man’s nuclear hubris. We got a chance to see that Bran’s knowledge is limited, but maybe, even knowing as much as he does, he needed some convincing from Arya and Sansa to put it to good use.
Chaos is a ladder, everybody.
WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON INÂ GAME OF THRONES?
- Conleth Hill insists that Varys is not a merman.
- Could Cersei become a Night Queen?
- RIP Littlefinger, a real player in the Game of Thrones.
Images: HBO
