MAISIE WILLIAMS: What, for you, has been Cersei’s best moment?
LENA HEADEY: I think the highlight was [last season] when she blew up the Great Sept of Baelor, then just enjoyed her wine. And this season coming, because she’s lost everything. Whatever was good [in her life] has been erased and she’s a horrible cow to one particular character… It’s really quite loathsome.
MW: You’ve told me that you were a rebellious teenager…
LH: [Laughs] Yes, I would sneak boys into my house all the time. We lived in a tiny little house in Yorkshire with a tiny little landing, and one night my boyfriend got up to have a wee and found my mum sitting naked on the toilet. She was screaming, he was screaming, and my dad comes out of the bedroom and literally chased him out of the house, naked.
MW: Now that you’re a mother, do you worry about what your kids are going to get up to?
LH: Yes, and that’s why my mum loves to say, “There’s karma.” I was talking to a colleague the other day about raising children, and I said, “I’ve got a son [Wylie, seven] and a daughter [Teddy, two], and I know my son is going to enjoy his time sleeping with girls” – well, I know he is – but then I thought of my daughter and had an instinctive reaction: “No! No one’s touching you!” My mum’s like, welcome to the world of children.
MW: You’d been working for a long time before the role of Cersei came along. How did you adapt to the fame of the show?
LH: I’ve been acting for 25 years and this has opened a lot of doors for me. I can now say I’d like to produce something and people don’t just say, “Ha, whatever” – they’ll listen to a conversation at least. But it’s not changed my life because I did my madness when I was younger. I’d probably be dead
if [fame] had happened to me when I was young. The things it allows you to do, the places it takes you, the people you meet, the parties you go to... It’s bonkers.
MW: Being a woman in this industry is sometimes not the easiest. How have you found that?
LH: I was talking about this with another actress, and I said, “Do you find that you have to say the same things seven times, whereas a man says it once and everyone listens?” Male counterparts can say the same thing [I just did] and everyone’s like, “Oh, that’s a great idea,” and I’m like, “I just said that 19 times but you chose not to listen or take it on board.”
MW: You said that being a woman meant being judged on your looks as soon as you walk into a room.
LH: Yes. I’m happier now I’m older, playing women who aren’t expected to be beautiful. That pressure has gone for me. [Male] actors can be ‘interesting’, but there’s a real pressure on women to be beautiful and skinny. When I was in my twenties, and doing a lot of audition tapes in the States, a casting director told me: “The men take these tapes home and watch them and say, ‘Who would you fuck?’” I’ve never played the game of going in [to auditions] and flirting; I’ve never done it.
Read the full interview at The Edit.
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