'I'M ON THE YARDARM, HANGING ON FOR DEAR LIFE...'

Despite a hideous journey from his native Leicestershire to the east London studio where the photographs on these pages were taken, Tom Hopper — all six-foot-four and Men’s Health cover frame of him — is full of the joys of not-quite-spring when The Rake meets him one dreary day in March.

And so he might be. Just over a decade after graduating from the Rose Bruford drama school in Kent, the 32-year-old has become a respected actor, mostly thanks to roles as Sir Percival in the British fantasy-adventure Merlin and Billy Bones in Black Sails, a critically acclaimed U.S. pirate drama set 20 years before Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.

With his star set to soar a few more light years thanks to a role in season seven of Game of Thrones, Hopper talks to The Rake about his journey