Ed Ranks the Deaths of Sean Bean

Here to die and eat popcorn + all out of popcorn.

Sean Bean dies frequently in film and television. Contrary to popular belief, he hasn't died more than anyone else. But he's died quite a bit.

Let's talk about that, shall we? Here are Sean Bean's 25 (or 26, depending on how you count) film or TV deaths, ranked.

26. Wicked Blood (2014) - Bean is Frank Stinson, the leader of a powerful criminal organization. How powerful is he? Well, not powerful enough to not BE BLOWN UP. He's actually shot first, and then dies in an explosion. RIP. But nobody has seen this nothing film. So does Sean Bean really die if nobody has seen it?

25. Death Race 2 (2010) - Bean is Markus Kane, a mob boss. He gets shot in the chest. I don't really want to talk that much more about a direct-to-DVD sequel to a shitty Jason Statham film. RIP.

24. Age of Heroes (2011) - Bean is Jack Jones, a major in an elite black operations commando team in WWII. So he's basically the opposite now of when he was a Nazi in WWII earlier in his career. He and his unit are surrounded by Germans, and he helps his men to escape while he stays behind and dies off-screen, most likely shot by Nazis. RIP. This is only an implied death, so it gets ranked pretty low. Not as low as Death Race 2, I mean.

23. Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974 (2008) - Bean is John Dawson, an unscrupulous real estate agent who might also be a serial killer. At least Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield, actually) suspects that he is a serial killer, and shoots him in his private club. RIP. Get used to Sean Bean being shot. This is going to happen a lot. If he doesn't get shot in any particular or fantastic way, it will just be ranked really low.

22. Airborne (1998) - Bean plays Dave Toombs. This is a Steve Guttenberg action flick. From the 80's when Guttenberg was popular and might arguably have been named as the lead for an action flick? No. Well into the 90's. Almost the 2000's. Dave Toombs is arm arms dealer. In the role of Tombs, he gets shot in the chest and dies in an airplane hangar. RIP.

21. Essex Boys (2000) - Bean plays Jason Locke, an English drug kingpin in this flick that is (only loosely) based on the 1995 Rettendon murders. Sean Bean gets shot in the head while waiting to make a drug deal in his range rover. RIP.

20. Outlaw (2007) - Bean plays Danny Bryant, a veteran of many wars who returns home to a corrupt and crime-filled London. He decides he's going to do something about it and forms a vigilante group. Of course, cops aren't a big fan of vigilantes, and thus he's shot multiple times in a standoff in the woods against police. RIP.

19. Ca$h (2010) - Bean is twin brothers Pyke and Reese Kubic. One of the brothers is running from the cops and throws cash out the window. Chris Hemsworth finds the cash and starts spending it, until the other Sean Bean brother tracks him down and forces him to become a criminal to pay him back for the spent cash. Eventually, Bean (in the form of Pyke) is shot in the head. RIP. But then again, Bean is also playing Reese, who DOESN'T die, and who might get revenge in a sequel that is thankfully never made, because this film was bad. That's interesting enough to be ranked slightly higher, right? No. Whatever. He gets shot again.

18. The Hitcher (2007) - Bean plays the title character, the Hitcher. Who is the Hitcher? A serial killer! Oh, yikes. Well, his serial killing doesn't last forever, as one woman who he is trying to kill (Sophia Bush) instead blasts him multiple times with as shotgun, the last blast being right to his head. RIP. Yes, he's boring-ly getting shot once again, but at least it's done with a little visual flare this time.

17. Henry VIII (2003) - Bean plays Robert Aske, a lawyer who became a leader of rebellion in Yorkshire. What with him being rebellion leader, he is captured and hanged in chains, dying slowly.  RIP.  This should be more impressive and higher ranked, but it's not because the scene is pretty short and only implies his death after showing him hanging for a few seconds.

16. Lorna Doone (1990) - Bean plays Carver Doone. Doone is supposed to marry his cousin, Lorna (this is the 1600's, so nobody even questions this). But Lorna is not into that and would much rather marry Clive Owen instead. A jealous Sean Bean shoots Lorna on her wedding day, but she survives and Sean Bean is arrested and punished by being drowned in a mire. RIP. Should have taken swimming lessons, Sean.

15. Clarissa (1991) - Bean plays Robert Lovelace. He's a "bad boy" who loves/lusts after the title character, Clarissa. But he's a really bad boy, and plans on raping her for, like, revenge against her family or something terrible like that. Before that horrible thing can happen though, he's stabbed by a rapier in a duel. RIP. The other thing Sean needs to worry about other than guns is swords.

14. Equilibrium (2002) - Bean plays Cleric Partridge in a dystopian society where emotions are pretty much banned. Sean Bean is unsurprisingly one of the people who police this society. That is, until he himself begins to have feelings and falls in love. But his partner is Christian Bale, who realizes that Bean is having feelings and then shots him in the head, with the bullet going through a book first. RIP. Yep, we're back to guns again! This is, by far, the most interesting and artistically filmed version of Sean Bean being shot with a gun. No more guns as we move on. So now that we got that out of the way...

13. Scarlett (1994) - Bean plays Lord Fenton in this forgettable sequel to Gone with the Wind. Did you forget that they made a sequel to this? I did too! Anyway, he rapes Scarlett O'Hara (yikes), and also a woman named Mary (double yikes). Sounds like a bad guy. So Mary stabs him to death in his sleep. Scarlett goes on trial for the murder. I'm not sure I'm supposed to feel sympathy for her though. Fuck that cracker-ass racist Southern plantation bitch. I was cheering for General Sherman to burn all of that bitch's shit down in.

12. Far North (2007) - Bean plays Loki, a film that, like War Requiem, features very little dialogue, but this time it's in the arctic rather than WWII. He's caught in a love triangle with two women, one of which who kills the other and wears her face. A distraught Sean Bean commits suicide by walking out naked into the cold tundra to die. RIP. You gotta respect this dude's method of death. On another ranking, it could be #1. Oh wait, it is.

11. The Island (2005) - Bean plays Dr. Bernard Merrick. You might have seen this one where Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson are clones for their rich counterparts who might need thier organs. Bean/Merrick is, as you could guess by Bean's usual roles, the evil doctor in charge of this cloning. Ewan McGregor shoots him in the neck with a grappling hook as a building collapses, with the grappling hook catching on twisted metal and hanging him. RIP. I can see what they were going for. This is a big, Michael Bay action movie with an attempts for a grand, epic finale where they kill the bad guy. Unfortunately, it's just gibberish computer effects that makes me go "meh."

10. War Requiem (1989) - Bean plays an unnamed German soldier, in this World War II film with no dialogue. Sean Bean initially gets shot in the hand, but what really does him in the end is being bayoneted by an enemy solider. RIP. I don't know what I enjoy so much about seeing someone get bayoneted, but it's enough to crack the Top 10 for me.

9. Don't Say a Word (2001) - Bean plays Patrick Koster in a psychological thriller starring Michael Douglas and Brittany Murphy. Bean returns to his fairly standard role as a gang/criminal leader, this time specifically a jewel thief. Michael Douglas is able to get Sean Bean into a big ol' hole in the ground near an excavation machine and turns it on, and he is buried alive under tons of dirt. RIP. I guess being buried to death is just practical. Think of how much you save on funeral costs.

8. The Frankenstein Chronicles (2016) - Bean is Inspector John Marlott, a Thames River Police officer. He is executed by hanging, although he's later resurrected. So he was not really allowed to RIP. Does this one count? I'll go with yes! The hanging is cool, but since he's resurrected after, I can only rank it so high.

7. The Field (1990) - Bean plays Tadgh McCabe, an Irish farmer who is trying to protect the land that his father (Richard Harris) has rented and maintained (but not owned) for many years, and who gets involved with all sorts of weird stuff like killing donkeys and being an accessory to his dad killing Tom Berenger. The dad goes crazy and runs all his cattle off a cliff to their deaths. Sean Bean tries to stop the cattle from running off, but is himself trampled and pushed off a cliff by cattle. RIP. This one is just funny. As I was researching this, I sure wasn't expected "death by cow" to be one of Sean Bean's deaths, but here we are. I guess the statistics are right. Cows are murderers.

6. Caravaggio (1986) -  Bean plays Ranuccio, a street fighter who gets involved in a love triangle with famed painted Caravaggio (Nigel Terry) and a woman named Lena (Tilda Swinton). Perhaps it's even a love quartet, if you count Robbie Coltrane's character who Lena plans to become a mistress to. Ranuccio kills Lena, and in revenge Carravaggio cuts Sean Bean's throat. RIP. Sean Bean's first ever movie death. The first of many. This isn't ranked this high just because it was Bean's first death. Getting his throat slashed is just a neato way for him to die. Although the truth about how this killing really happened is... ah... well... yeah... it wasn't his throat that he slashed. Let's just end with that.

5. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001) - Bean plays Boromir. You've probably heard of this film, huh? Boromir is tempted by the ring and attempts to take it from Frodo. Despite this, he dies at least in some form of a heroic fashion. He fights the Uruk-hai to defend Pippin and Merry, and is felled by arrows to his chest, with Aragorn watching him slowly die. RIP. Getting shot with a bunch of arrows and slowly dying is great! I mean not for real. I don't want it to happen for me. I mean for a movie death. You know what I mean.

4. Patriot Games (1992) - Bean plays Sean Miller. OH YEAH! A MOVIE YOU'VE PROBABLY SEEN! He's the main villain and an IRA leader fighting against Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford). You do NOT fuck with Harrison Ford, obviously, because after he gets into a fight with Harrison Ford on a speed boat, Jack Ryan impales him against the speed boat's anchor, and then the speed boat crashes and blows up. RIP. You got impalement. You got explosions. You got Harrison Ford. What's not to like?

3. GoldenEye (1995) - Bean plays Alec Trevelyan, AKA MI6 Agent "006." He sort of dies twice in this movie, although the first death is faked. After seemingly being killed by a Russian Colonel at the beginning of the film, it's later revealed that he lived and turned evil! Now he's the villain for the entire film! Fortunately at the end of the film, James Bond throws him of a giant antenna tower, sending him falling to his death and ker-splatting against the ground. RIP.

Ow?

2. Black Death (2010) - Bean is Ulrich, a solider in black plague-era England who is investigating why nobody in a town is dying. He suspects perhaps some necromancer could be raising the dead, which would be totally gross. He catches the plague himself, which he could have died from slowly and painfully. However, he doesn't have to suffer through that, and instead, he is drawn and quartered by horses. YIKES! And also RIP. This is just fucking gruesome, man.

1. Game of Thrones (2011) - Bean is Eddard (Ned) Stark, Lord of Winterfell and more recently the Hand of the King. He is beheaded by Sir Ilyn Payne, by order of the new King Joffrey. You probably have heard about this one. RIP. This death is all about it's surprise value. No, it wouldn't have been a surprise if you read the books (but books are for nerds!), but to most people this was a total shock and not the way to told a story (killed the main protagonist of the story before the first season was even over).