How Game Of Thrones’ Sean Bean Used His Own LA Culture Shock As Inspiration For Ned Stark – Looper

In an interview with Vulture, Sean Bean explained how his own experience with culture shock when he came to Los Angeles helped him understand how Ned Stark would feel going to King’s Landing. Sean Bean is from Sheffield, England, a smaller city than L.A. full of “steel factories and coal mines.” Although he had already experienced culture shock before when he went to London for school and work, Bean expressed that the L.A. culture shock was more intense.

Bean said, “There’s a lot of two-faced people and very shallow people in L.A. I’m not particularly fond of the place, but it’s been good to me in the sense that I’ve been offered work there and I’ve enjoyed it. But it’s certainly not somewhere I would feel comfortable living for any long period of time. You have to take everyone with a pinch of salt because everyone’s in it. They’re all very ambitious people, that’s why they go there, and I understand that. But at first, I didn’t understand that, and I couldn’t understand why people promised things and then they broke their word.”

This is certainly similar to Ned Stark’s experience of King’s Landing. Although Ned has business in King’s Landing and is initially happy to travel there for that purpose, things don’t exactly go as planned. The people Ned meets in King’s Landing lie, cheat, steal, murder, rape, and torture. They commit these actions mostly out of ambition, either because they are trying to win the Iron Throne or at least advance their station in a cutthroat world. Furthermore, nobody can be trusted because many have secret motives. Luckily, Bean at least was not decapitated in L.A. like Ned Stark.