Time has been widely praised for its realism by people who’ve experienced the system from the inside, from retired prison officers to former inmates. It’s not just the critics giving the show their stamp of approval either. “The performances of Bean and Graham are – even though we have come to expect brilliance from them both – astonishing,” The Guardian said in their 5/5-star review. Time has an 8.2/10 rating on IMDb, and a rare 100% critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus says, “Strong writing and a magnificent performance from Sean Bean make for an incredible, thought-provoking watch.”
They are brilliant actors full stop, but when they’re vulnerable, they are even more brilliant.” “These two guys have played really hard men,” he says, “but they’re at their best when they’re not hard, when they’re vulnerable. Jimmy says Time’s two lead roles were written with Sean and Stephen in mind.
Sean was nominated for a BAFTA for Jimmy’s 2017 series Broken, where he starred as a Catholic priest, and won for his role as a cross-dresser in Jimmy’s acclaimed 2012 drama, Accused, where Stephen played his conflicted partner.
The four-part miniseries isn’t the pair’s first outing together, nor is it their first time around the block with four-time BAFTA winner Jimmy McGovern, Time’s creator. Stephen is dedicated prison officer Eric McNally, who faces an impossible choice when one of the most dangerous inmates identifies his weakness. Time sees Sean cast as mild-mannered former teacher Mark Cobden, newly imprisoned and confronting the harsh realities of prison life. And here he is, in peril again, making us uncomfortable, again. That fear isn’t helped, either, by the actor’s penchant for playing particularly sympathetic characters we’d rather not see killed off. There’s a built-in tension to any series starring Sean Bean – we fear for his character, given that the actor has died on screen more than 20 times. Time earned Sean Bean (Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings) his second BAFTA as Lead Actor earlier this year, with his co-star Stephen Graham (Line of Duty, Boardwalk Empire) nominated for Supporting Actor and Lewis Arnold (Broadchurch) for Director. Odds are Bean knew about this theory perfectly well, and his answer was just yet another tip of the hat to book readers and super-fans-something actors on the show have been fond of in the past.Named Best Miniseries at the 2022 BAFTAs, the hard-hitting BBC prison drama Time is now available to binge on Showmax.
Really, it wasn’t just Sean Bean trying to tell you this was the case all along. The recent season 6 finale confirmed it: Jon was not, in fact, Ned Stark’s son, but Ned’s sister Lyanna’s, born in the remote Tower of Joy after her kidnapping and rape at the hands of Rhaegar Targaryen. Little bastard!” Having happened more than a year ago, when Jon Snow was ostensibly killed off the show and some viewers had never wondered if he might be anything but Ned Stark’s bastard, it was kind of an odd answer was Ned Stark disavowing Jon Snow, right there on the Internet, or was Bean asking us to make the reasonable leap that he, an actor, had not raised fellow actor Kit Harington?īook readers, however, were already very much on the case one of the primary reasons Game of Thrones fans refused to buy Jon Snow’s death was that the story of his true parentage, heavily hinted at but not yet confirmed in the books, seemed like an essential detail, something the story couldn’t wrap up without addressing. What did Sean Bean do, exactly? The actor, who was the “star” of the series until Ned Stark got his head chopped off at the end of season 1, answered a Redditor’s question of “Why did you not teach Jon Snow anything?” with a cheeky “Because he’s not mine. As Game of Thrones fans puzzle over a newly resurfaced Reddit AMA, in which Sean Bean supposedly “spoils” the twist that ended the most recent season, let us remember that this is not the first time a cast member appeared to reveal something that, for book readers or fans of elaborate theories, has been there all along. Internet family, we’ve been down this road before.