Sean Bean makes authority believable before the script has earned it, and we rate his understated work more highly than the hard-man casting might suggest. The danger is that a familiar part asks him to do too little.
Fi1m perspective
Ronnie Phelan is a threat in This City Is Ours (2025) because Sean Bean makes us take him seriously, even when the gangland manoeuvring is familiar. We felt uneasy watching Ronnie, and it was Bean’s authority, rather than a surprising situation, that did it. This is the useful thing about his tough men: the drama can get on without having to keep demonstrating how tough they are. It is also why casting him can become a substitute for writing the character properly.
Sharpe (1993) established his television presence as Richard Sharpe, while action films helped fix the expectation of a hard man. In GoldenEye (1995), he plays Alec Trevelyan in a film we like for its briskness and Martin Campbell’s handling of the action. Its attempts to give Bond greater emotional weight are less convincing. That early film casting could be restrictive: once an actor makes toughness this readily believable, films can keep asking for it and little else.
Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and Ned Stark in Game of Thrones (2011) brought wider recognition. The later move towards leading roles in British television gave his understatement more room. Father Michael Kerrigan in Broken (2017) and Mark Cobden in Time (2021) belong to that stretch, with Jimmy McGovern writing the latter. Time is a useful corrective to the hard-man casting: Bean makes a troubled man credible without overplaying his distress.
Back in This City Is Ours, Bean is useful without being the whole reason to watch. James Nelson-Joyce gives the series its strongest claim on our attention, and Michael and Diana’s relationship matters more than the routine betrayals. Julie Graham’s Elaine Phelan is another reason to stay with the family scenes. Both actors make their characters credible, though that also makes the weaker stretches of Butchard’s writing more conspicuous. Watch it for the actors, rather than in the hope that the next betrayal will surprise.
Biography
Sean Bean is an English actor. He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made his professional stage debut in a 1983 production of Romeo and Juliet. He first gained widespread recognition for his portrayal of Richard Sharpe in the ITV series Sharpe (1993–1997).
Bean's film credits include Patriot Games (1992), GoldenEye (1995), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Return of the King (2003) as Boromir, Troy (2004), National Treasure (2004), The Martian (2015) and Jupiter Ascending (2015). On television he has appeared in Game of Thrones (2011) as Eddard Stark, Time (2021), for which he won the BAFTA Television Award for Leading Actor in 2022, and This City Is Ours (2025) as Ronnie Phelan.
