‘Game of Thrones’: Bran Stark Actor Isaac Hempstead Wright Details Nightmare College Experience

Being a star on Game of Thrones isn’t always easy, and it even led actor Isaac Hempstead Wright to drop out of school.

The actor, who portrays Bran Stark on the popular HBO series, opened up about his difficult college experience in a recent interview with Esquire UK, revealing that while he had been enrolled at the University of Birmingham in England studying math and music, his level of fame eventually led him to drop out.

“I walked in and this girl just looked at me,” he recalled of his first day of college. “And I was like: ‘Hello,’ and they were like ‘Hi(!)’. I went down to get some more stuff and when I came back, they’d had like a flat conference to say: Oh my God, what the f– is going on.”

“We went for dinner and they didn’t actually say anything until, eventually, one of their mates was like: ‘So apparently you’re in Game of Thrones?!’ I went out to some awful club night, and it was just … a massacre,” he continued.

Things only worsened after pictures of Wright at the University of Birmingham surfaced, followed by his address being released.

“My address got published. I couldn’t walk out of my halls without having to take a selfie. Eventually, I got assigned a campus police officer,” Wright said. “There were so many tweets. And because your email is public domain, I got like, billions of emails from people going: ‘Hi, three-eyed raven!’. I was just trying to find out where my next lecture was.”

His fame and notoriety eventually made surviving on a college campus next to impossible, leading him to realize that he will “never have the normal college experience.”

“I had the nicest flatmates. But it made it quite difficult to make friends,” he said. “don’t think I’ll ever be able to have a normal university experience, which is kind of sad. I couldn’t relax and go out and have a drink or get drunk or whatever, because if I did someone would be like: ‘I saw Bran and he was all f–ed up.’”

Wright ultimately withdrew from the University of Birmingham to instead focus on his acting career full-time, and is set to appear alongside the other surviving Stark siblings in the final season of Game of Thrones, portraying warg, greenseer, and new Three-Eyed Raven Bran Stark.

Game of Thrones Season 8 premieres on Sunday, April 14 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.