Why Edward From Voyagers Looks So Familiar
After blowing minds and enjoying unexpected box-office success with brain-enhancement thriller Limitless, director Neil Burger has made his long-awaited return to sci-fi WTF-ery with Voyagers. Ostensibly a space adventure about a group of 30 young men and women sent on a multi-generational mission to find a new planet for mankind to inhabit, the movie quickly reveals a darker, wilder side as the mission goes awry, with strange events prompting the characters to act on their basest primitive instincts.
The recruits — all of them bred in a laboratory and raised with the single purpose of carrying out the mission — are played by a large cast of young actors, including some up-and-comers, some unknowns, and some familiar faces. Among the latter is Isaac Hempstead Wright, who plays Edward, the party's most methodical and level-headed member, described by the actor as "a character who is evidence-based and focused, and just loves the data." But who is Isaac Hempstead Wright? There is one big role for which you might remember the English actor, and a couple more in addition to that.
Isaac Hempstead Wright played middle Stark child Bran in Game of Thrones
When Game of Thrones began its casting process in 2009 (via WinterIsComing.net), the producers already had certain actors in mind for their roles, like Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. But some roles, such as the Stark children, would require a lot of work to find the perfect actors. Thankfully, casting legend Nina Gold was on hand, and it was through her efforts that first-timer Isaac Hempstead Wright was finally announced as Bran Stark in October 2009 — the last of the Starks to be cast.
Bran Stark began the show as one of the youngest Stark children, whose habit of running and climbing around Winterfell accidentally sets the entire plot of the show into motion when he walks in on siblings Cersei (Lena Headey) and Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) having sex, prompting Jaime to shove him out of a high window. The near-death experience leaves Bran crippled and in a coma for weeks, but also gives him special powers: He becomes a "warg," able to enter the minds of animals, and a "greenseer" with prophetic visions.
This mystic awakening often kept Bran separate from the rest of his family and the show's political intrigue, as he focused on traveling around Westeros to fulfill his destiny as the North's newest "Three-Eyed Raven," to the point where he became a somewhat overlooked character among fans. Therefore, it was through no fault of Wright's that, when Bran's story finally dovetailed with the larger plot in a major way near the end of the series, the results were extremely controversial.
Isaac Hempstead Wright had roles in two very different early 2010s thrillers
Prior to Voyagers, Isaac Hempstead Wright had only two live-action movie roles, both within two years of his Game of Thrones debut. The movies were both thrillers, both starred Rebecca Hall, and both, coincidentally, had Wright playing characters named "Tom," but that's just about where the similarities stop.
The 2011 horror-bent film, The Awakening, is an old-fashioned ghost story, following a 1920s supernatural debunker, Florence Cathcart (Hall), as she investigates potential apparitions at an all-boys boarding school in North West England. Wright plays Tom Hill, a lonely boy who is crashing at the school during half-term because his parents live in India. It was a major role that took full advantage of the eerie presence Wright would go on to display on latter seasons of Game of Thrones, but the film wasn't successful outside of Europe, and earned mixed reviews, with a 62% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Then, in 2013, Wright appeared in his first proper Hollywood movie, albeit one shot in England. An American-British co-production, Closed Circuit is a political thriller about Martin Rose (Eric Bana) and Claudia Simmons-Howe (Hall), two former lovers working on the defense team of a man suspected of leading a terrorist attack. Wright has a very small role as Tom Rose, the son of Martin and his ex-wife Elizabeth (Jemma Powell). The film also had a mixed reception and a middling box office performance — just a $6.3 million worldwide gross, according to Box Office Mojo. In fact, Wright's most successful project outside of Thrones was arguably not a movie, but a music video.
Wright starred in the surreal music video for Foals' "Exits"
British indie rockers Foals released their fifth studio album, Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost – Part 1, in March 2019, as part of a two-part project that concluded with the release of Part 2 in October of the same year. The album's release was backed by an epic six-minute lead single, "Exits," which had its equally epic video unveiled on January 21, 2019.
Directed by Albert Moya, the video for "Exits" stars Isaac Hempstead Wright alongside French actress Christa Théret as a pair of students at a fencing academy who alternately get dragged off vintage cars by men in suits, perform exercises inside (or outside?) a glass box, watch themselves and each other on old TV sets, dance amid colored strobe lights, walk around a mysterious futuristic facility, and run blindfolded through a forest, all while struggling to stay close to each other. If that sounds weird, that's because it is: The video employs deliberately surreal, hectic visuals to illustrate the fractured lyrics about the paranoid current state of our world. Despite the apparent lack of a coherent narrative, Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis has told NME that the video "has a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order."
Between his turn in Voyagers and the gusto with which he throws himself into the increasingly striking vignettes of "Exits," Wright appears to have taken a liking to the strange and mysterious in his post-Thrones career.