Which Actor Beats Sean Bean's Massive On-Screen Death Count?

Thought Sean Bean died a lot in the movies? Well, there’s a new king of the on-screen death in town, and he makes Bean look like a rank amateur.

Step forward… (drum roll, please)… Mr John Hurt.

Much has been made of Bean’s poor record of lasting the full length of a movie without being gunned down, beheaded, filled with arrows, knocked of a cliff by cows or pulled apart by horses.

But thanks to Kyle Hill at Nerdist, Hurt has been, erm, fatally hurt far more times – 43, in fact.

Bean – who has stacked up 25 – doesn’t even feature in the top three, beaten as he is by horror stars Bela Lugosi (36) and Vincent Price (33).

Sean then comes in at number four, followed by Japanese-American actor Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Gary Busey, Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, Lance Henriksen and Samuel L. Jackson making up the top 10.

Pleasingly for Bean, he can still catch up – Hurt is 19 years older than Bean, and has more movies on his CV, thus more opportunities to cark it.

Bean has remarked upon his propensity towards death before now (there’s also an supercut of his deaths - some really very gruesome indeed - here…)

In an interview with the Daily Mail last year, he said: “I’ve died a lot of different deaths. Maybe it’s the quality of my death people are fascinated by. I liked Lord Of The Rings. Big death.”

Hurt too has addressed the fragility of his on-screen personas, saying: “It got to a point where my children wouldn’t ask me if I died [in a film], but rather, ‘how do you die?'”

But, as with such matters, there are some minor discrepancies in the aforementioned figures.

The Vocativ website has Hurt’s death count slightly higher at 45, and meanwhile, Nerdist’s findings include Sean Bean’s TV deaths too, but not Hurt’s.

The Daily Telegraph has sorted that out, adding another two TV deaths to Hurt’s tally, making it 47 in all, so he still beats Bean pretty convincingly.

To paraphrase Andy Dufresne in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, ‘you either get busy living, or get busy dying’.

So, Sean… you know what to do.

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Image credits: PA/AP/Nerdist/HBO