After over 30 years of meeting his maker, Sean Bean is looking back on his first onscreen death in the historical drama Caravaggio and his infamous trend of dying. Though having found larger success with the British war drama series Sharpe, Bean made his acting debut with the British procedural series The Bill and Caravaggio. The English actor has since become a household name thanks to his roles in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Pierce Brosnan’s first James Bond movie GoldenEye and HBO’s Game of Thrones, all of which shared one unique element for the actor.

While speaking exclusively with Screen Rant to discuss the live-action manga adaptation Knights of the Zodiac, Sean Bean looked back on his infamous trend of dying on screen in movies and TV shows. In addition to reiterating his appreciation for his Lord of the Rings demise, Bean recalled his very first onscreen death in the historical drama Caravaggio and how it would kick off the rest. See what Bean said below:

Lord of the Rings was a good one. My first death was a film called Caravaggio, which is about the artist Caravaggio, by Derek Jarmain, he’s a wonderful guy, great director. That was my first death, I got my throat slit, which is okay, it’s your first day, so you’re thinking, “Oh great.” [Laughs] But then it goes on, and on, and on. I suppose the best death was Boromir in Lord of the Rings, that was a very epic kind of death, it was very emotional, very moving, and Peter Jackson allowed me enough time to die and milk it, and get the music and pathos. I like that one.

Sean Bean’s History Of Onscreen Deaths

Since his death in Caravaggio, Bean has become something of a running joke among audiences for whether his appearance in a film regarding life or death stakes will see him survive the events of the story. In the near 40 years following the historical drama, the English actor has died 23 times on both the big and small screen in a variety of projects, ranging from simple gunshots to more outrageous means of demise.

The ’90s in particular proved to be one of the more fatal for Bean onscreen beginning with the Western drama Lorna Doone, where he accidentally drowns himself, followed by the Oscar-nominated Irish drama The Field, in which his emotionally stunted character is pushed off a cliff by a herd of cattle. After a handful of more grounded deaths in Clarissa, Patriot Games and Scarlett, he would see a more grand demise in 1995’s GoldenEye, in which his James Bond villain is dropped from an antenna and has a satellite subsequently dropped on him.

The turn of the century further brought some of Sean Bean‘s more iconic onscreen deaths, including Boromir’s heroic sacrifice in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, being torn and quartered in Black Death and decapitated in HBO’s Game of Thrones. Despite being killed off in a number of other projects in the 2000s and 2010s, Bean has since pulled back on this trend, turning down characters whose fates are sealed before the movie or show’s conclusion.