Actor trades fantasy for fairy tale

Richard Madden is the Prince in Disney's live-action Cinderella.

Game of Thrones’ Richard Madden tells Stuart Husband how he survived a stint in the bloody fantasy epic to become Disney’s new Prince Charming.

No one can deny that, in his latest role, Richard Madden makes an impressive entrance. Midway through Disney's live-action revamp of Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh, he comes galloping into a forest glade on a steaming black horse, mid-stag hunt, to embark on a gentle flirtation with the heroine (a poised Lily James). With his blue eyes and sumptuous green velvet frock-coat, the Game of Thrones star looks every inch the Prince Charming he is portraying. And that, according to him, is where the trouble starts.

"I mean, apart from the fact that he's dashing, what do we know about this prince?" he asks in his lilting Scots burr. "Nothing. I felt like I was creating something from scratch, so how do you prepare?"

Madden has a point. Even Prince Charming's own Wikipedia entry harrumphs that "these characters are seldom deeply characterised, or even distinguishable from other such men who marry the heroine". So the actor turned to Branagh for advice. "He had me studying the likes of the princes of Monaco, reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Machiavelli's The Prince," he says, grinning. "And I'm going, hang on, this is Disney, right? But it had to be a slightly more complex take than the standard girl-in-distress, handsome-man-saves-the-day thing. We've changed the message: he needs her as much as she needs him, and they don't realise it 'til they meet." He takes a swig of water. "It modernises the story."

Cinderella remains the ultimate tale of makeover wish-fulfilment - "Project Runway for 5-year-olds", as one critic has described it - and its resurrection is a canny move on Disney's part. Following the success of Maleficent and Frozen, the company has realised that girls, rather than boys, are now driving the family multiplex market. Madden hopes that "boys are going to like this movie, too", but that may be wishful thinking.

Madden says that he accepted the role because "it's a fairy tale, sure, but there's enough bubbling away beneath the surface so it's less binary and simplistic". But this is no dark reimagining along the lines of Kristen Stewart's punky performance in Snow White and the Huntsman.

It's also very far removed from the murky, bloody universe of Game of Thrones, in which Madden played the ill-fated Robb Stark. The King in the North wouldn't be caught dead in Charming's outfit of unforgiving white leggings and knee-high boots.

At 11, he made his baptism-of-fire film debut in an adaptation of Iain Banks' novel Complicity. "My first scene saw me getting raped by a big 50-year-old ginger Scotsman," he says. Graduating from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2007, and then, in 2011, Game of Thrones came along.

"Right from the start, the other cast members would say, 'You've read the books, right? You know you're going to die?'" Stark was offed so offhandedly and bloodily, alongside his wife and mother, in the middle of a marriage ceremony that the grisly scene is known as the Red Wedding, and caused viewers to spring in horror off their sofas.

"There were lots of tears," says Madden. "I'd spent more time with my on-screen mother, Michelle Fairley, over those years, than my real mother, so we were having to say goodbye as friends as well as colleagues, in the most violent and horrible way."

The show raised Madden's profile, to the point where, as he says, "I could get into rooms with the likes of Kenneth Branagh". And the fact that he has been in a relationship with Doctor Who actress Jenna Coleman since 2011 also hasn't escaped the tabloids' notice. But he likes to keep things low-key, telling stories against himself (including one about the time he was "so skint" in New York that he took a bus instead of a cab, and was fumbling for change when he noticed his own face, as Robb Stark, emblazoned on the side of the vehicle), and saying, of he and Coleman, that "we both stay away from doing press and talking about each other in interviews; we like to keep it private."

He will next be seen as Mellors, the gamekeeper and lover of Lady Chatterley, in Jed Mercurio's BBC adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's novel, and as an American pickpocket on the streets of Paris in Bastille, alongside Idris Elba. "I like to try to change things up a bit," he says. "I've done a few old-style romantic leads now." And what would he rather do instead? "I'd really like to shave my hair off and get a bit more hard-edged." A skinhead Prince Charming? Disney, you have been warned.

Who: Richard Madden, former Game of Thrones star turned Prince Charming

What: Cinderella

When and where: Opens Thursday