When I first found out that I’d be interviewing Isaac Hempstead Wright – the actor who plays one of the most important characters on one of my most favourite TV shows ever – I didn’t imagine it would be while I’m sitting on my doorstep, locked out of my house, with the unrelenting din of the nearby overpass a whisker away from being too loud to do the whole thing anyway.

But when you’re about to chat to Bran Stark, you can’t let a bit of background noise get in the way. This is Game of Thrones’s omniscient, omnipresent Three-Eyed Raven, we’re talking about. The once-boy-now-man slated to hold the entire future of the Seven Kingdoms in his palm. I try my best not to stan and immediately pry for spoilers from the television adaptation of George RR Martin’s epic fantasy series as soon as he picks up, opting instead for muttering the weirdest sounding “Hey Issac” ever. His greeting is markedly more confident.

Born in Epsom, Isaac did not come from a particularly theatrical home, and being only 12 years old when Thrones came knocking, his cinematic inspirations are limited – “Does Spongebob count?” – though he reminisces about his love for storytelling as a child. But there is no “I was born for this” origin tale here. Game of Thrones and even HBO were virtually unheard of in the small Surrey town in which he lived and drama school was “something to do at the weekends” when it was too cold outside to play football. “It’s funny because I ended up filming in the freezing cold for nine years!” The now 19-year-old laughs.

Isaac attributes his unknownness in the acting world as to one of the reasons he scored his breakthrough part. “Obviously it’s great to give people an opportunity they’ve never had before,” he explains. “But I also think it’s nice because you get a freshness and rawness when people are new to it, especially with a show like Thrones where the characters are so well drawn out and well put together and believable. It’s nice to have people whose faces you’ve never seen before, because it’s not like ‘Oh, there’s so-and-so who played a cop in that thing.’ That would take away from the whole magic of it. That’s probably what made it so immersive: people haven’t seen the actors or the characters before so they’re looking at it as if we arethe characters.”

Isaac’s connection to Bran is unsurprisingly unshakeable. When he first started the show, he hadn’t even hit his teens yet, and subsequently spent the majority of his formative years battling White Walkers in “The North”. “Looking back retrospectively, I can just see how fucking weird my childhood’s been,” he laughs. “It’s literally my adolescence! I’ve become a man on Thrones.” With this in mind, I ask him about the show’s penchant for suddenly killing off its protagonists (mostly Bran’s family) and what impact this has on the cast. “It’s devastating!” He exclaims. “You’re spending a huge amount of time in close proximity with these people so they are hugely close and important to you. When you lose one of them, it’s really like losing a very, very good friend. I found that especially with Kristian Nairn, who played Hodor. Losing him was a really sad thing.”