Warning: Major spoilers ahead for Netflix’s “3 Body Problem.”
John Bradley is one of the few actors who can say his character made it through all eight seasons of “Game of Thrones”—the most stab-happy series in TV history—alive and well. But when “Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss cast Bradley on their new Netflix sci-fi series “3 Body Problem,” they flipped the script and wrote him his very own death scene.
Based on the first novel in Liu Cixin’s 2008 sci-fi trilogy “Remembrance of Earth’s Past,” “3 Body Problem” is the sprawling story of Earth’s first contact with a malevolent alien civilization. Bradley plays brash snack-food magnate Jack Rooney, who meets his untimely demise on the third episode at the hands of Tatiana Haas (Marlo Kelly), an acolyte of a cult devoted to helping the extraterrestrials.
“It feels a bit like being present at your own funeral. There’s a sense of just the weight of the day that’s kind of hard to describe,” Bradley told us on his episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast. But it’s much easier for him to talk about the technical difficulties that made the experience that much more surreal.
“I had a blood rig that was taped to my neck, with a guy a few feet away who was going to pump blood out when [Kelly] stabbed me,” he remembers. But on the first take, the rig misfired. With only one spare costume on hand, production gave it another go—and it misfired again.
Ed Miller/Netflix
“We had to reshoot it,” Bradley explains. “The scene you see now at the end of episode three is a combination of [retakes from] April 22, Aug. 22, and Feb. 23.”
However, this piecemeal approach helped him expand his acting skills. “The first time, I felt all these [emotions],” he says. “[But] the other two times we tried, it was just like, Oh, God, I hope it technically works this time. It’s an interesting lesson to learn. You care so much about how you’re putting things across and what your performance is like, but you’re just as much at the mercy of a rubber pipe; that’s as likely to mess the scene up as anything that you do.”
Much of Bradley’s acting education has happened while on set—after all, “Game of Thrones” was his first gig after he graduated from the Manchester School of Theatre. If you’re interested in following in his footsteps, Bradley says there are nuggets of wisdom to be found in every part of the job—including getting stabbed in the neck by an outer-space cultist.
“As an actor, you think you’re at the forefront of this whole process; but the guy with the blood rig was just as vital to that scene as I was in the end,” he says. “Making a show or film—there’s a lot of art to it. But also, it’s a lot of work, and there are very practical, very physical things that you [have to] fit your artistry around. I don’t mean to spoil the illusion for anybody, but I think it’s interesting to know that it’s just as much [about] the practical as it is the art.”