BIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE BLAGDEN

George Blagden is an English film and theater actor. He is popular for playing the roles of Louis XIV in ‘Versailles’, Grantaire in ‘Les Miserables’ and Athelstan in ‘Vikings’

GEORGE BLAGDEN ACTOR CAREER

Blagden started his acting career in 2011. He played Andy in ‘After the Dark’. The film was released in 2014. It then appeared on ‘Wrath of the Titans’.

In TV shows, Blagden has appeared as Louis XIV on ‘Versailles’, and as ‘Athelstan on the history TV show, ‘Vikings’.

ACTOR ATHELSTAN | GEORGE BLAGDEN VIKINGS | ACTOR ATHELSTAN VIKINGS

Blagden is featured in the drama series, Vikings as Athelstan. Vikings, the drama series, was released in March 2013.

GEORGE BLAGDEN ALEXANDER VLAHOS | GEORGE BLAGDEN AND ALEXANDER VLAHOS

George co-stars alongside Alexandre Vlahos, his brother in the 10-episode series Versailles. The series explores the history of France in a unique and modern way. The story is set in 1667 when King Louis XIV (George Blagden) was a 28-year-old monarch and a ruthless leader who would stop at nothing to take absolute control of France and its enemies. His brother, Philippe ( Alexandre Vlahos ) was causing his own stir.

GEORGE BLAGDEN LES MISERABLES | GEORGE BLAGDEN IN LES MISERABLES

Blagden is featured in Les Misérables as Grantaire. Les Miserables features an ensemble cast led by Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne, Amanda Seyfried , Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen.

GEORGE BLAGDEN TARTUFFE | TARTUFFE GEORGE BLAGDEN

Blagden is currently playing Damis in Tartuffe at the Theater Royal Haymarket

GEORGE BLAGDEN COMPANY

George starred as PJ in the musical Company. The Company was produced by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth. Other Company cast members included Boyd Gaines, Kate Burton, Robert Westenberg, Diana Canova, Debra Monk, LaChanze, Charlotte d’Amboise, Jane Krakowski , Danny Burstein and Veanne Cox

GEORGE BLAGDEN AGE | GEORGE PAUL BLAGDEN

Blagden was born George Paul Blagden on December 28, 1989 in London, United Kingdom. He turns 30 in 2019.

GEORGE BLAGDEN FAMILY

No information about Blagden’s parents or siblings is released to the public.

GEORGE BLAGDEN WIFE | GEORGE BLAGDEN PARTNER | GEORGE BLAGDEN GAY

Since 2014, George Blagden has had a relationship with Elinor Crawley . George and Elinor both starred in Vikings. So he’s not gay. Elinor and George broke up in 2018.

LAURA PITT PULFORD GEORGE BLAGDEN

George is currently dating Laura Pitt Pulford. They met on stage and their love is burning as they can’t keep their arms off each other. Laura, a British actress is best known for her work in musical theatre.
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GEORGE BLAGDEN CHILDREN | GEORGE BLAGDEN CHILDREN

No information about the Blagden children is released to the public.

George Blagden

GEORGE BLAGDEN | BLAGDEN GEORGE FORMATION

Blagden studied at Old Buckenham Hall School. He then joined Oundle School on a drama scholarship.

After graduating, he joined the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and studied acting. He graduated in 2011.

GEORGE BLAGDEN MOVIES AND TV SHOWS

Movie

• Blight (short)
• Moon of blood
• Hold a good time (short)
• The Tap Tap Lady (short film)
• after dark
• Wrath of the Titans
• Wretched

Television

• Versailles
• vikings
• black mirror

Theater

• Platinum
• The Disney Pitchfork
• Tartuffe
• Company

GEORGE BLAGDEN NET WORTH

Blagden has a net worth of $500,000.

GEORGE BLAGDEN HEIGHT

He stands at a height of 1.75 meters (5 feet 9 inches).

GEORGE BLAGDEN EYE COLOR

He has blue eyes.

GEORGE BLAGDEN DIABETES UK

Blagden is a supporter of Diabetes UK. He has so far raised £5,000 for the charity from September 4-6, having covered Paris in 72 hours.

GEORGE BLAGDEN ON TWITTER

GEORGE BLAGDEN ON INSTAGRAM

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GEORGE BLAGDEN ON YOUTUBE

Vikings – George Blagden – Athelstan

INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE BLAGDEN

BWW interview: George Blagden talks about TARTUFFE

Posted: June 19, 2018

Source:

George Blagden is well known for the roles of Athelstan on Vikings and Louis XIV on Versailles, as well as Grantaire in the film Les Misèrables. He is currently playing Damis in Tartuffe at the Theater Royal Haymarket.

How did you first become interested in theater?

I first became interested in school. When I was about ten years old, I was brought to London to watch a production of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I think it was at Sadler’s Wells in 2000 maybe. I watched it because my school was producing it and it was the first school play I got to audition for a speech. And I came to watch it thinking, ‘What is this theater thing?’.

I remember at the end of production, when they were doing their curtain call, they said to my mom, “I really want to be one of those people someday.” And I did school plays, and then when I was 18, I applied to a drama school in London and got in. I have been very lucky that no one so far has stopped me from living my dream – the industry or my parents.

How did your experience shape up to become an actor?

I went to Guildhall School of Music and Drama and it was amazing. I absolutely loved my three years at Guildhall. It gave me a good foundation for what I do in my job now. I’ve spent a lot of my career working on screen, and it’s only recently, in the last two years, that I’ve started doing theater projects.

It’s kind of a testament to training at Guildhall that even eight years after leaving school I still felt confident with things I had learned to be able to go into a production like Tartuffe at the Haymarket and have the I felt like I wasn’t going to be. overwhelmed playing in such a big space.

They have a good philosophy at Guildhall in that they throw loads of different things at you. Their theory is that after you leave, if you use 10 of those 100 things, great. The other 90 you might not agree or work for you as an actor. But if you can find 10 that work for you, you ultimately walk away as a best actor. It was definitely my process. I wouldn’t be where I am now in my career if I hadn’t been to Guildhall.

Many theater fans may remember you as Grantaire in the movie Les Mis. How was this experience?

It was extraordinary. I was sort of the musical theater boy at Guildhall. And I mean I wasn’t on a musical theater class or anything, but among the actors in my year, I think I was perceived as the one who could have a career in musical theater because I could sing.

I left Guildhall to go make a movie in Indonesia and when I got back I found they were auditioning for the movie Les Mis. It seemed like a perfect marriage of two worlds: training in drama school, developing my voice and learning to act properly through song, and then I had just made this film and learned to tell stories at the camera. It was such a lucky chance that this job came at that time. I gave it my all in my four or five auditions with Tom [Hooper], the director.

The experience was amazing. It was like working on a theater project for me almost, because the group of students (apart from Aaron [Tveit], who played Enjolras, and Eddie [Redmayne], who played Marius) had been in the show Les Mis in the West End at some point in their career. It was like being in a theater company.

We rehearsed, which is very rare in movies – you usually show up on set and film what you’re supposed to shoot that day. On the film Les Mis, we rehearsed for a good month before we started filming, making sure that all the singing elements were in place, blocking out certain scenes. In fact, it felt like my first theater job, if I’m being honest. Plus, working with this caliber of cast was amazing. I was desperately trying to be a sponge and absorb everything when I was on set with them.

You have also spent the last few years playing King Louis XIV at Versailles. How did that happen?

It’s been another amazing adventure that I’ve been very, very lucky to be able to be part of. They decided they wanted to tell this French story in English and hire British actors, so I had the opportunity to audition for it. I am still processing it. I finished filming season 3 in October, which I know is a long time ago.

But it’s the only kind of environment as an actor where you spend so much time with a character that continues to develop. You can spend years in the same theater job, but you repeat the same journey for that character every night. Only in long-form television can you spend so much time with a character that continues to develop. You really grow with this character yourself. When someone says, ‘You’re not going to do this anymore’, it takes time to say goodbye and move on.

It was an incredible opportunity and I feel very privileged to have been able to play very different characters throughout my career. Playing Louis was a pretty transformative thing for me because I don’t see a lot of George in him. Obviously, I’m there somewhere under the wig, but a lot of his character traits and aspects of his personality are very different from mine. I enjoyed the kind of escape to another world and another character for three years.

There’s a certain irony that you’re now in a room that was actually banned by Louis XIV, right?

Yeah! I’m ashamed to say, after spending three years playing Louis XIV, I had no real idea he banned it when I came to audition for the show.

When I auditioned, I was going to read for the role I’m playing, which is Damis, and I remember one of the producers was really excited about me playing the officer at the end of the play. I never ended up reading for the officer, because the director said he would like me to play Damis.

But I remember thinking “Hmm, that’s weird. The producer was really excited about me for this role, I wonder why”. Once I took office and learned that Louis XIV had banned it, it made sense. The character of the officer enters and gives this speech that Molière added to the play to allow it to be performed. It’s kind of a sardonic tribute to the king, or in our current version, the American president. So there is a bit of irony. I had a lot of fun playing Damis, who again isn’t that George-like.

I have to ask: did you name your dog after Louis XIV?

Yes. Full stop, I did. I wanted to take some time off when I finished shooting Versailles in October. My partner Laura and I had talked about finding a dog and we were playing with names, and Laura jokingly said, “And Louis?”. The most annoying thing was that it really suited him and so we thought, “Why not?”. And that’s the case; it suits him really well.

Paul Blagden, what attracted you to Tartuffe? Did you know him before being chosen?

I knew. This was done in my school while I was there. I was not an expert on the question, because some of its actors are specialists. What attracted me this time was the director who placed it in modern Los Angeles, a kind of America of Trump, and that Tartuffe is this American evangelist priest.

I think what Paul [Anderson] is doing with Tartuffe on the show is phenomenal. He’s really able to balance that scary fine line between being very, very nice and playing some of the high comedy moments in the play, but also being really dark. The point of our adaptation is that there is a dark underbelly in this world.

I know the director wanted to try to reflect modern day politics in the show and point out that it can be pretty ridiculous right now in 2018 – the extreme end of politics in the western world. What’s important is that we have to remember that there’s a creepy, dark undercurrent beneath it all, and sometimes it really isn’t funny, no matter how extreme.

I was just drawn to this new approach and the aspect that it’s a bilingual production. Since my second season at Versailles, when I started to feel really comfortable with French, I wanted to play in French. This opportunity came up and I thought, ‘Great, I can make my West End debut in two languages’. It was also very exciting for me.

You have participated in several projects in which you play French characters. Did you study French growing up?

No, I learned a little at school and my parents lived in France for a few years, but I didn’t speak French fluently at all. I’m still not really! But between my entry to Versailles and the end of three years, my French has improved incredibly. When you live in a foreign country, you learn the language so quickly. I insisted on speaking to the entire crew in French.

I convinced my director that I could order a coffee during my audition. We arrived and of course it’s Molière, it’s classical French, the equivalent of Shakespeare. I realized that as much as I could grasp the word ‘croissant’ or ‘pain au chocolat’, part of the Molière might be slightly beyond me. But it was great that I could have this challenge to not only understand what I was saying, but to say it like I say it. It is in a way the fundamental principles of the action.

What’s it like to work with this cast which is a mixture of French and English actors?

What I learned at Versailles is that culturally, storytelling is very different. I mean, largely not. We all like the same stories. You can go to any culture in the world and sit around a campfire and tell the same story in different languages, and a good story is a good story. But the storytelling techniques, I noticed at Versailles, are different depending on the culture.

I knew that would also be the case in this process, working with French actors and a French director. The stories are told differently and it’s a really interesting process. Moreover, acting too is different. The basics are all there and are all similar. But to play a classic Molière, you have to play it in a very different way from the English that Christopher [Hampton] wrote.

For example, we discovered during rehearsals that when we see classic performances here in the UK in English, we are able to absorb the story more when an actor is able to hide the rhythm and rhyme. When you see Shakespeare and it seems like normal colloquialism, to my liking anyway, I feel like I understand and acquire more of the story. When I see Shakespeare in the UK and it looks too much like poetry, I somehow become less attached to the story and the characters I see.

Whereas in France, with the classic Molière, I learned that it is in fact the opposite. The couplets of Alexandrian rhymes in which Molière writes are structured in such a way that they must be obeyed and played with. Many French actors, you hear them speak it wonderfully.

When you get to a certain level of understanding with French, you find that you understand it better when you play with rhyme and rhythm and accentuate it more. It’s not just the first level to speak two languages; this is the second level of performance in these languages. And it’s a real challenge, but very enjoyable.

Do you think there should be more bilingual productions like this?

I think there was an opportunity with Tartuffe because we made it so that Tartuffe’s character only speaks English and doesn’t understand any French. The kind of comic element of the show’s farce might actually have another layer of comedy attached to the element lost in translation. You can have French speaking characters on stage around Tartuffe and he doesn’t understand what they are saying.

I think there is such a culture in the world I come from, the screen world. Many of my friends really enjoy watching subtitled dramas now. You know, there’s this thing on Channel 4 called Walter Presents, which is a collection of foreign drama, and it’s getting a lot more popular.

We are able to consume, as an audience here in the UK, foreign drama much more easily. We are less bothered by the fact that we have to read the subtitles. Would love to see more shows like this in the West End where people try to do it in multiple languages. As long as it fits the narrative of the play and enhances the storytelling rather than hinders, then why not?

Why do you think people should come see Tartuffe?

I think people should come and see Tartuffe because it’s fabulous. No just kidding. Anyone who knows it will know it as a pretty high comedy. It’s generally outrageous comedy, apparently. We tried to make it a bit darker, sleeker and modern take on this world and comment on the hypocrisy in 2018.

I think people will appreciate the parallels and see characters like the character that Paul [Anderson] created and maybe recognize him as someone in our modern society, people who try to deceive other people. And also, at the end of the play, fall in love with him. We love anti-heroes, like Walter White in Breaking Bad, or Louis XIV at Versailles. Paul is fantastic, and I think people will enjoy watching him grow with this fairly involved family on the west coast of Los Angeles.

Do you hope to do more acting in the future or focus on screen roles?

I would love to do more theater – I really like doing it. I would also love to do more things on screen. I’ve always had this ability to want to do as many different things as possible. I would love to do a musical at some point and hope to have the opportunity to do so in the future. I’ll let you know when I find another job!

Do you have any dream future roles?

You know what? I do not. I think (I’m going to sound really pretentious now, so I’m sorry) there’s a beautiful thing about this industry if you let the industry be your guide. A lot of actors probably wouldn’t agree with me saying that – they like to decide what role they’re playing and say, ‘I’m in charge of my career’.

But if you can let go of control, there’s a nice way this industry presents things to you and says, “Hey, would you like to do that?” It can teach you something about yourself and your abilities as an actor. It can take you to things you never thought you’d be in. I would never have thought of being Louis XIV at Versailles for three years and going to live in Paris.

If you let the roles come to you, you end up having a much more colorful and interesting journey than deciding “This is what I want to do” and limiting yourself to just one industry branch. I would like to continue doing as many different things as possible: TV, theater, film, anything.

Any advice for budding actors?

I was asked this question a few years ago and the answer I gave was: be brave. It’s still very important and it’s something I still struggle to do. It’s very hard to go into an audition room and be brave. And it’s one of the most heartbreaking moments in an actor’s life.

It’s very easy, as a young actor, to think, “I don’t want to be wrong” rather than, “I want to make this as interesting as possible.” I always do. I go to the audition rooms and think, “What do they want to see? There’s obviously a good way to do that.” You should find the most interesting thing you can and do it. I try to do it more and more. It makes the job more interesting.