For Game of Thrones fans worrying that they haven’t seen John Bradley in a while, don’t worry: He was busy trading dragons and swords for screen time with Halle Berry and Jennifer Lopez.
The British actor’s “happy” he has two big new movies arriving in as many weeks, Roland Emmerich’s sci-fi action film Moonfall (in theatres now) and the romantic comedy Marry Me (in theatres and on Peacock Friday), since “it looks like I’ve been doing nothing at all for nearly three years now. Like I’ve gone into involuntary retirement after ‘Game of Thrones,’ never to be heard of again.”
Marry Me features Bradley as Colin Calloway, the hard-working manager of mega pop star Kat Valdez (Lopez) when she unexpectedly marries a concert-goer (Owen Wilson). And in Moonfall, Bradley plays conspiracy theorist KC Houseman, who teams up with a pair of astronauts (Berry and Patrick Wilson) to save the world when the moon is knocked out of orbit.
Bradley, 33, immediately connected with KC, an isolated man “completely adrift and alone” who finds his purpose, the actor says. “In the middle of the pandemic and the climate crisis, it’s a bit of a lesson as to how unassuming everyday people can have a hand in doing big things if they are determined, stick to their guns and just don’t give in.”
Whether you’re a hardcore Thrones aficionado or a new Bradley fan, here are five things to know about the music-adoring, soccer-loving Brit:
Thrones was Bradley’s first acting gig after graduating from drama school in 2010, but after eight seasons playing goodhearted academic Samwell Tarly on the hit fantasy show, “I just wanted to stay away from that for a while,” he says. With Marry Me, “I don’t think you could get further away from Game of Thrones if you tried.”
And Bradley took a lesson in work ethic from his iconic co-star, Lopez: “She’s a complete triple threat, she’s a phenomenon. And for everything she’s achieved, she’s still determined to get every single dance step, every single note and every single line of the scene as good as it could possibly be.”
While Bradley worked a lot on green-screen sets for Moonfall space scenes, the on-Earth stuff was rougher, especially one sequence where tidal waves cause a flood in a hotel lobby that KC has to escape. And that meant working on a set filled with freezing cold water. “Every time we introduced new water, more filth would rise up off the carpet and it became a healthy shade of chocolate brown,” Bradley says. “And I swallowed gallons of it as I was pretending to drown.” (USAToday)
