HER OWN POWER MOVES
A candid conversation and home visit with Lena Headey, Cersei in GameOfThrones
‘Are you [expletive] 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, England, a realm of charming villages and no observable traffic laws. The back is filled with car seats and mum-ish 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, beginning Sunday on HBO.
“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 long-standing 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, meme-able 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 realworld 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 said.
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, roughly 180 miles northwest of London. “My life’s been mad for the last year,” she said.
But with Game Of Thrones about to end, why would Headey leave the showbiz capital at the moment of her highest profile in a 25-year career? Put another way: Now that the actress, like Cersei, has more clout than ever, what is she going to do with it?
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, at the magnificent swathes of countryside, stitched together with hedgerows and ancient stone walls.
“This made up a part of me when I was born,” she said as we drove through villages with names like Kirkburton and Thunder Bridge. “I’m a Yorkshire lass in my soul and in my heart.”
In a navy tank top and tattered jeans, her numerous tattoos exposed, she looked less likely to rule seven kingdoms than to front an art-punk trio. Her dark-brown hair — concealed on the show initially by flowing blond tresses and now by a bobbed wig known on set as “the Turnip” — is cut in a shoulder-length shag that she tends to muss and tease in conversation. Her northern accent is rounder and softer than Cersei’s posh, crystalline one — “love” sounds like “loaf” — and is often deployed profanely.
Headey was born in Bermuda while her father was stationed there as a police officer. But she grew up in Highburton, a village of just over 3,000 residents, and as she drove she noted landmarks like the centuries-old cemetery where she used to drink cheap booze as “a wayward teen”.
“I’m really selling myself, aren’t I?” she said.
For all of their rustic charms, the villages of Yorkshire were less than nurturing for a young girl with artistic aspirations. In high school, she said, she told a guidance counsellor she hoped to become an actor, only to be told that she should instead work in a shop “to get the social aspect you’re craving”.
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 recalled.
She cast her in Waterland, a 1992 literary adaptation starring Jeremy Irons and Ethan Hawke, and soon the country girl
I’m a Yorkshire lass in my soul and in my heart
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 British 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” he was reading for HBO, adding that “there’s this great part for his sister, who’s this incestuous psychopath”, Headey recalled.
In auditions for Game Of Thrones, Headey separated herself, the creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss explained in a joint email, by straying “far from the Evil Ice Queen stereotype”, and capturing the internal tension of a woman destined for privilege, subjugation and loss in equal measure.
“Lena was the only one who conveyed the discomfort that comes with being Cersei — the sense of perpetual scrutiny and besiegement that comes with her position in the world, a position she never chose,” they wrote.
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.
Starring on the biggest television show in the world brings plenty of such overtures, like more-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 breastfeed in her hospital room, 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 said.
“I was flying on morphine, so it was sort of funny,” she said. “Had I been vaguely in the world, I might have been more offended.”
Headey is matter-of-fact about “the boys’ club” that dominates the entertainment industry. “You grow up in it, and you learn to infiltrate it,” she said, though sometimes it’s not so easy. As a young actress, she faced pressure to sleep with powerful men, she said, adding that “I never played the game”.