Home stretch
Arch manipulator Cersei has endured endless tragedy in epic fantasy Game of Thrones, but for Lena Headey it’s been a dream role. Back in her native Yorkshire after years in LA, the actor talks to Jeremy Egner as she prepares to shoot the final episodes of
Are you f***ing serious right now?” Lena Headey is incredulous, an amused smile curving lips best known for sneering as Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones .She is piloting her black Land Rover through the narrow, twisty roads of her native West Yorkshire. The back is filled with car seats and children’s detritus, signs of a bountiful family life decidedly at odds with that of Cersei, one of the most persecuted (and vindictive) characters on a show known for baroque miseries.
One quality the actress does share with her most famous character: she doesn’t suffer fools, especially reporters foolish enough to ask for details about the obsessively secretive show’s seventh season.
“Um, she’s not having a good time – there you go,” she adds, laughing. “Apparently winter is really coming, finally.”
It’s a joke on the show’s longstanding tag line, but also a reminder that the end is in sight for Game of Thrones. With just 13 episodes remaining – seven this season and six the next — this sprawling fantasy epic has entered its climactic stretch.
Season 7 will be largely about bringing together primary characters that either have been long separated, or who have never actually met. At the top of the heap sits Cersei, who over six seasons lost her father and three children – three murders and a suicide – along with her dignity, during a nude walk of shame that ranks among television’s most memorable, memeable sequences. Then, at the end of last season, she blew up half the show and claimed the coveted Iron Throne for herself.
It was the tale’s latest shocking twist, but also a logical culmination for a season that saw the major female characters overcome all sorts of tribulations – as well as real-world complaints about the show’s sexual violence – to emerge as the game’s most formidable players.
Together, characters like the politically savvy Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), the assassin Arya (Maisie Williams) and the messianic dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) represent a broad range of feminine power. “Having all of these females rise, in all their different guises – it’s sort of unheard-of really,” Headey says.
For Cersei, the Season 6 finale solidified her status as the most captivating of them all. And for the woman who plays her, it came at the beginning of a frenetic stretch that saw her get engaged a few years after a divorce left her reeling, and relocate her family from Los Angeles, where she lived for 12 years, to a tiny village near where she grew up. “My life’s been mad for the last year,” she says.
To understand why Headey, 43, felt the pull of home after more than 20 years away, it helps to get a look at the place. Yet for all of their rustic charms, the villages of Yorkshire were less than nurturing for a young girl with artistic aspirations. Nevertheless she persisted, and a national theatre competition in London brought Headey, then 17, to the attention of Susie Figgis, a noted casting director. “She was just this wonderful, fresh country girl,” Figgis recalls.
She cast her in Waterland ,a1992 literary adaptation starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke, and soon the country girl was off to London. She spent the 1990s and early 2000s appearing in films notable (The Remains of the Day, The Jungle Book) and forgotten (The Parole Officer), as well as a string of television series. Her most high-profile part came in 2007 as a strong-willed queen in Zack Snyder’s 300, a film better remembered for writhing beefcake captured with then-innovative chroma key cinematography.
She later reprised the role in a sequel, but it was a little-seen indie film from 2010 called Pete Smalls Is Dead that had the more lasting effect. During filming, her co-star Peter Dinklage mentioned “this mad thing”
“Having all of these females rise, it’s sort of unheard-of really”
he was reading for HBO, adding that “there’s this great part for his sister, who’s this incestuous psychopath,” Headey recalls.
“I thought she would be a good fit for Cersei because anyone as funny as Lena is can also plumb the darkest depths,” Dinklage, who plays Cersei’s heroic brother Tyrion, says. “The two always go hand in hand.”
While Cersei is known for her acid tongue and signature lines (“You win or you die”; “Power is power”), some of her most memorable moments feature few words. These include the walk of shame and her explosive coup d’état last season, in which her rivals assembled inside the Great Sept, expecting to persecute Cersei, only to be incinerated when she blew up the church instead.
As Cersei surveys the destruction
from a balcony, her bloody redemption plays out in her expression, cycling from cruel resolve to cool reflection to, finally, delight at claiming the power she’s long coveted.
“She can do more with a look than most of us can with a couple pages of dialogue,” says Conleth Hill, who plays the cagey eunuch Varys.
As she is reviewing the state of House Lannister, we’re sitting outside House Headey, a graceful 19th-century Georgian manor at the top of a hill, fronted with towering birch trees. Her parents, both retired, live minutes away, and they – more than anything – are what brought her back.
“I would’ve stayed in LA and played the game, but I want my kids to have a bit of grounding,” she says. “In the last two weeks, my son has said to my dad, ‘I just want to be like you, Grandpa.’”
“That confirms to me,” she adds, her voice catching, “that we did a good thing.”
At least once a week Headey takes a train to London for meetings, voice-over work and other billpaying endeavours. Starring on the biggest television show in the world brings plenty of such overtures, like awkward photo requests – say, while sunbathing nearly naked in Ibiza – to a steady stream of pilgrims who want to tip a goblet with Cersei, the Baryshnikov of TV wine drinking.
But most common are fans channelling Septa Unella, the malignant nun who scolded Cersei during her infamous walk of atonement through Kings Landing in Season 5. (“Shame! Shame!”) Perhaps most egregious was a nurse who got caught up in the moment while helping Headey breast-feed in hospital, shortly after giving birth to her daughter. The story ends with the nurse, nipples in hand, chanting “Shame” as “she’s milking me like a human cow,” Headey says.
“I was flying on morphine, so it was sort of funny,” she says. “Had I been vaguely in the world, I might have been more offended.”
As evil queen roles come rolling in, she is instead developing her own films. These include an adaptation of
H is for Hawk, the Helen Macdonald memoir, which she is starring in and producing with Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment, as well as a dream project about Grace O’malley, a female pirate in 16th-century Ireland. She also hopes to create more opportunities for female filmmakers, she says, and also do some directing herself.
Otherwise she plans to finish moving into her house and generally take it easy until filming starts this autumn on the final season of Game
of Thrones. Like everyone else on the show, she faces an uncertain fate, but at least will finally learn who finishes up on the Iron Throne in the end.
“It can’t be me because I’m already there,” she says. “So I’m f***ed.” ■
Season seven of Game of Thrones continues on Sky Atlantic, Mondays, 9pm.