Game Of Thrones Changed Iwan Rheon's Career - There Was Just One Downside

It's a tricky thing when an actor gets typecast. Whether a younger woman always gets cast as a wide-eyed ingenue or Helena Bonham Carter always seems to portray her very specific brand of "weird lady," it can make performers feel like they're stuck in a rut. If a newcomer plays a very specific archetype, it can lead to that actor being forced into the same kind of role over and over again. Iwan Rheon, who played Ramsay Bolton on "Game of Thrones," says he definitely experienced this after exiting the series in its 6th season.

In December 2023, the Welsh-born actor spoke to the Radio Times and admitted that he's found it difficult to score a wide variety of roles in a post-Ramsay world because Ramsay made him so famous so quickly but also cemented him as an actor capable of playing one of the worst villains in recent TV history.

When the outlet referred to Ramsay as a "reputation-making role," Rheon readily agreed. "There's no other way of looking at it," he replied. "Because of the magnitude of the show, it did loads for my career. But it brought a lot of barriers as well. All of a sudden you're just getting offered lots of parts where they want you to do the same thing. ... I was like: 'Can I play a nice guy, please?'"

Anyone familiar with "Game of Thrones" knows just how awful Iwan Rheon's Ramsay Bolton is during his multi-season run on the hit HBO fantasy series. Originally named Ramsay Snow — due to his status as a Northern-born bastard to Roose Bolton (Michael McElhatton) — Ramsay is odious from the first second he's introduced in Season 2, where he works with Roose to overthrow the occupation of Winterfell by Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen). Though Robb Stark (Richard Madden), a supposed ally of the Boltons (who eventually betray him at the Red Wedding), asks that Ramsay take captives alive, Ramsay kills several of Theon's Ironborn soldiers for fun and ends up taking Theon hostage, kidnapping him, and torturing him from then on.

This is pretty indicative of Ramsay's whole deal. He tortures and mutilates Theon, emotionally abusing the former Stark ward until Theon truly believes his name is Reek and he has no living family. (The living Greyjoys would beg to differ.) Ramsay is eventually handed an unwilling bride in Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), and he regularly assaults her throughout their mercifully brief marriage. Oh, and he hunts prisoners with his hungry hounds when he's bored. When he's ripped apart by said hounds after being defeated by Sansa and her brother-ally Jon Snow (Kit Harington) in the Battle of the Bastards, it's honestly a huge relief.

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Since "Game of Thrones," Iwan Rheon has stayed booked and busy. After exiting the show in 2016, Rheon appeared in a handful of films, including 2017's "Daisy Winters" as well as 2019's "Berlin, I Love You" and "The Dirt." In 2021, he played roles in "The Toll" (alternatively known as "Tollbooth") and "Barbarians," the latter of which sees him playing a victim of rampant violence rather than a perpetrator like Ramsay.

As far as the small screen, Rheon remains a mainstay, snagging a main role on the Marvel Cinematic Universe series "Inhumans" in 2017, where he plays the villainous Maximus. In 2021, he joined the popular series "American Gods" for its 3rd season as Liam Doyle, and he voiced real-life royal Prince William in the animated parody "The Prince." The year 2023 saw two major projects for Rheon: the dark British crime miniseries "Wolf," where he plays Molina, and the BBC series "Men Up," which looks back at the strange way medical experts first developed Viagra.

If you've somehow forgotten how rotten Rheon was as Ramsay Bolton, "Game of Thrones" is streaming in its entirety on Netflix.