Paul Bettany shares ‘enormous guilt’ after brother died aged 8 in fall from school roof

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Paul Bettany has opened up about his grief following his brother Matthew’s death in a horrific childhood accident.

The WandaVision star was just 16 when Matthew died aged eight after falling off of the roof of a school in Hertforshire.

The family had been living on the grounds of the boarding school at the time, where their father worked as a drama teacher.

Bettany, 55, explained that he has battled “enormous guilt” over the tragedy as he had been the one to teach Matthew how to climb the building he later fell from.

“My brother died when he was eight. And that was bad. I guess that’s part of the reason I ended up on the streets busking,” he said on the Sibling Revelry podcast on Tuesday.

“It was really incredibly hard. He fell off, I guess he was playing hide and seek and he fell off a building that I had taught him how to climb. So there was an enormous amount of guilt to work through on that.”

Paul Bettany shared his ‘guilt’ over his brother’s deathABCAfter Matthew’s death, Bettany left school and moved to London, where he earned money busking with his guitar. He previously revealed how he turned to alcohol and cocaine to cope with his grief.

“I thought I should have stuck close to him – been there for him – but I wasn’t,” he explained.

Despite his early troubles, Bettany graduated from the Drama Centre London and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company before entering film, scoring early success with Gangster No 1 in 2000, followed by Hollywood films A Knight’s Tale, A Beautiful Mind, Master & Commander: The Far Side of The World and The Da Vinci Code.

The A Very British Scandal star – who has two children with his Hollywood actress wife Jennifer Connelly, 55 – said he encountered some “big revelations” through therapy.

“I think that everybody is dropped into a maze by their childhood. And the job of growing up is trying to find your way out of that maze. And I did,” he said.

“But it took some doing and a lot of time, you know, a lot of therapy. The thing about therapy is you really want to go when you’re in crisis, you really want to show up. But when you’re not in crisis, it’s hard to motivate yourself to go.

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“But those are where the big revelations happened for me… when I was in crisis, I was just too busy trying to stay on the earth.”

Bettany eventually stopped blaming the difficulties in his life on Matthew’s death.

Bettany with his wife Jennifer ConnellyGetty“When you have a big moment of trauma, it’s very easy to hang every issue or every problem that you perceive that you have on this one moment where you feel like it was life before Matthew died and life after Matthew died,” he said.

“And it’s only moments of calm when you’re really able to sort of unpick it and kind of go, huh, that wasn’t about that at all. That was about this other thing.”

The Avengers star previously revealed he had a “psychological break” following Matthew’s death.

“It exploded our family. I had a real psychological break there,” he told The Independent in 2021.

Bettany added that he thinks of Matthew when he needs to cry on camera, admitting: “It’s madness. I’m 50 years old now and still keeping these wounds fresh.

“I do it – and I really do mean this – because I’m just not good enough to do it imaginatively in the moment”.

If you are struggling with mental health, you can speak to a trained advisor from Mind mental health charity on 0300 123 3393 or email [email protected]