I’M NOT SO EVIL!
‘Thrones’ star says don’t hate me, hate Cersei
MOVE OVER Julia Roberts — you’re not the only evil queen in town this weekend.
Actress Lena Headey returns tonight for the second season of HBO’S hit “Game of Thrones” as Queen Cersei Lannister, one of the most reviled villains on television.
“Sometimes it’s fun being naughty,” Headey told the News.
But unlike Roberts’ storybook baddie in the movie “Mirror, Mirror,” Headey says she’s worried that fans — and even co-stars — are starting to mistake her for her wicked character.
At the end of a long day of shooting a dinner scene where Cersei inflicts thinly veiled threats and insults at her beleaguered future daughter-in-law, Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), the tables quickly turn.
“[Sophie] always says, ‘You’re horrible!’ and I go, ‘I don’t really mean it,’ ” Headey says in a pleading voice that belies her onscreen image.
Welcome to the 38-year-old British beauty’s world since she first strapped on the long blond wig and ridiculously tight corset to play Cersei in the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” books. “Anyone who isn’t us is an enemy,” is Cersei’s signature line; her machinations to put her sadistic inbred son on the throne has left the first season’s hero, Sansa’s father Ned, without a head.
Fans seem to hold a grudge. There’s a Facebook group called “I think Cersei Lannister needs her head lopped off!”
It’s even gone sour at San Diego Comiccon, the annual mecca for geeks where Headey was once treated as a conquering hero as the (good) queen from “300” and then as the titular Terminator-killer in the television series, “The Sarah Connor Chronicles.”
“I was sitting between (Peter) Dinklage and Emilia (Clarke), who are the most beloved characters on the show. I literally just got ignored,” she says of her visit last summer. “People were giving Pete the books to sign and they kept moving away from me as if I was going to curse them.”
Off screen, Headey doesn’t share much in common with her character. She sports dark hair that usually is cut close to the bottom of her neck. Though she’s also a mother, she’s not training her 2-yearold son Willie Elliot to smite his enemies and wage war on the North.
Born in Bermuda as the daughter of a British police officer stationed there at the time, Headey is a law-abiding citizen and squarely on the side of the good guys.
And if it’s any consolation for fans, Cersei is suffering greatly even as she’s inflicting pain — courtesy of a corset that could double as a medeivel torture device.
“As they undo it at the end of the day,” Headey laughs, “I can slowly feel my bread roll make it to my stomach where it should’ve been, as opposed to sitting on top of the corset.”