"I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have a normal university experience, which is kind of sad," Isaac Hempstead Wright said

While going off to college is a time when many students form lifelong friendships, the experience proved to be more difficult for Game of Thrones star Isaac Hempstead Wright.



Weeks before the eighth and final season of GoT premieres on April 14, 19-year-old Wright spoke with Esquire U.K. about the HBO series coming to an end — and how playing Bran Stark has impacted his off-camera life, specifically entering the university scene.

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“I walked in and this girl just looked at me. 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,” Wright said of starting school at the University of Birmingham. “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.”

After beginning school, Wright said that he received an influx of emails from the student body.

“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,” he told the outlet. (Read the full interview on Esquire U.K.‘s website).

Although Wright said that he “had the nicest flatmates,” he quickly realized that he wouldn’t be able to have the same experience as many fellow students due to him starring on the drama.

Image zoom Isaac Hempstead Wright

“But it made it quite difficult to make friends. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to have a normal university experience, which is kind of sad,” he explained.

Wright added that he “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.’ ”

“I was a bit of a hermit,” he told Esquire U.K. “My ex-girlfriend came up to visit and we just sat in my room for a week.”

Prior to becoming a celebrity, Wright said that he “was just a typical kid.”

“Hanging out in the woods. Playing football,” he said in the interview. “I grew up properly in the countryside proper — nothing there, no shops or anything. Even when the show started to get big, my friends were too young to watch it. It was actually all the teachers who were big fans — it gave me a lot of kudos with them.”

Image zoom Isaac Hempstead Wright Esquire UK

In 2016, the English actor opened up about his rather advanced hobbies: particle physics and classical piano.

“I’ve gone through various interests, before physics it was neuroscience and how the brain works,” Wright told PEOPLE of his off-screen interests. “Through that, I had a fantastic physics teacher at my school, he is a really smart guy and I would talk to him in general about things that might link to neuroscience and before I knew it he was telling me about other interesting concepts and I got into the whole idea of particle physics and that fascinated me.”

Wright’s interest in the subject led to a visit to the world’s biggest particle accelerator in Sur, Switzerland, but he said at the time that he wanted to study physics as a hobby versus a possible career path.

“I’ve kind of been flitting between what I think I want to do, what I should do, what I shouldn’t do, so I’m not so sure anymore if physics is something I want to do with my life but I find it fascinating to read about and to understand,” said Wright. “My interest probably stops there, I don’t think I’d be good enough to or have the patience to do full time. It’s a topic I find really engaging because we know so little about it. It’s constantly evolving and changing.”

WATCH: How Game of Thrones Created That Epic, Fiery Dragon Scene

His true passion, though, is music — specifically, playing the piano.