Isaac Hempstead Wright's college experience makes you think, for just a second, that starring in the most popular TV show in the world might not be worth it. The 20-year-old, who plays Bran Stark in Game Of Thrones, spoke to Esquire ahead of the show's final season and revealed that his time at Birmingham University in the UK was cut short due to his overwhelming three-eyed raven fame.
Wright enrolled in the university in September 2017 with hopes of studying math and music (he's extremely gifted at both). But the universe — or rather, his classmates — had other plans.
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"I walked in and this girl just looked at me," he remembers from moving into his college apartment. "And I was like: ‘Hello’, and they were like 'Hi (!)'. I went down to get some more stuff and when I came back, they’d had like a flat conference to say: oh my god, what the fuck is going on...We went for dinner and they didn’t actually say anything until, eventually, one of their mates was like: ‘so apparently you’re in ‘Game of Thrones?!’ From there we out to some awful club and it was just...a massacre."
Wright had never experienced being mobbed before, despite growing up on the TV show for the past eight years, but that wasn't even the half of it.
"My address got published. I couldn’t walk out of my halls without having to take a selfie. Eventually I got assigned a campus police officer," he explained. "There were so many tweets. And because your email is public domain, I got like, billions of emails from people going: ‘Hi, three-eyed raven!’ I was just trying to find out where my next lecture was."
Eventually, he left school to return to Game Of Thrones full time and, unfortunately, he doesn't think a normal university experience is in his future.
"I couldn’t relax and go out and have a drink or get drunk or whatever, because if I did someone would be like: ‘I saw Bran and he was all fucked up.'"
But perhaps something better than a degree is in Bran's future: the Iron Throne. Now that will really get people at school talking.