Game Of Thrones 7: Bran’s Actor Drew Inspiration from Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan

Though a lot of fans were happy that the Starks finally met each other again in Game of Thrones season 7, a lot have admittedly been weirded out by Bran a.k.a. The Three-Eyed Raven. As it turns out, actor Isaac Hempstead Wright was drawing inspiration from Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan for his performance.

In an interview with Vulture, Wright explains:

"It was a really challenging thing to do this season. I had a meeting with David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss], our showrunners, before we started filming. We had a chat about how we wanted to play Bran this season, and they suggested Doctor Manhattan from the Watchmen comic. Bran was slightly based on that, existing in all these different times at once, knowing all these various things, being this emotionless rock connecting these different timelines and the history of the universe. We wanted that, but we didn't want a boring, monotonous character who would just go, ‘Yeah, I'm the Three-Eyed Raven, blah blah blah.' It becomes a bit unbelievable, and also it becomes a bit dull. Not that the whole thing isn't completely unbelievable, but you know what I mean.

We also wanted to make sure that there was a bit of Bran left, a glimmer of a person still in there. It's like he's the first cyborg. We just connected a supercomputer to a human being's brain. He's a mainframe, but there's a little bit of his personality. More often than not, though, Bran is a vessel for human knowledge."

In the comics, Doctor Manhattan was a super-powered being who could perceive time differently (among other things), hence making him seem unfeeling or indifferent toward human suffering. When Bran was recovered, he was neither happy nor sad, but a monotonous, all-seeing, unfeeling weirdo whose mission was just to stop the Night King.

It's actually pretty cool that Wright was asked to draw inspiration from the character. The two do have some similarities, and everyone else reacted to them the same way they did. By the end of Watchmen, Doctor Manhattan still manages to rediscover his humanity, and by the end of season seven, Bran also managed to be a bit more use to the Starks; he was still pretty emotionless, but at least he helped.

Game of Thrones returns to HBO either on 2018 or 2019.

See Also: Game Of Thrones: Lena Headey Shares Cersei's Thoughts When She First Sees Daenerys