Carice Van Houten, who plays Melisandre, a Red Priestess, on HBO’s Game of Thrones, posed topless for a photo shoot in Elle.
She also gave a candid interview about her life and her character. The actress gets recognized quite a bit these days. Her character uses “sex, trickery, dark magic, and straight-up atrocities to get what she wants” and people are still intimidated when she walks into a room in real life.
But in reality, Elle writes that van Houten is slighter than you’d expect and makes a lot of Friends jokes. Before Game of Thrones, she was completely unfamiliar with the fantasy genre. She was asked early on to audition for the role of Cersei and declined. But then Seth Meyers — van Houten once dated his brother Josh — chided her for not watching the show. She watched the first season and became hooked, and jumped on the role when she was asked to come in to audition for Melisandre.
Season seven of the show is currently on air, and even though she only makes two brief appearances so far this season, Melisandre “helps move the Game of Thrones chess pieces towards their end game.”
“I’ve had some really epic scenes,” Carice told Elle. “In fact, I’m spoiled because now I feel like, ‘Where was my big, crazy scene this year?’”
She is known for being a ruthless character, one who convinces Stannis to set his daughter aflame, but Van Houten never saw her character as simply evil.
“I see her as a fanatic, someone who had a really strong vision of the future and was not prepared to let it go,” van Houten explains in the interview. “As we know from history and fiction, nobody we consider to be evil thinks they’re evil. Look at stuff going on in the world right now. The guys we find scary, they think they’re doing the right thing. That’s the scariest thing about it.”
The dutch actress is married to Guy Pearce, and they had their first child eleven months ago.
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