Lord Eddard Stark

Warden of the North and Lord of Winterfell, Ned Stark is a soldier and father who would rather be home than at court. Summoned south to serve as Hand of the King, he brings his rigid sense of honor and duty into a capital built on flattery and lies, and it fits him badly.

Sean Bean plays Ned as a man of granite decency dropped into a nest of vipers, and the show uses that mismatch to devastating effect. His plainness is the point: every scene of him trying to do right in a world that punishes rightness makes the stakes of the story unmistakably real.