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Game of Thrones' Carice van Houten on death threats from fans: ‘People take it too seriously’
For someone who is supposed to embody a 300-year-old woman, it has to be said that Carice van Houten looks pretty good. In Game of Thrones’ seventh and penultimate season, Carice plays the mysterious Melisandre, a priestess who has weathered several centuries.
In season six her age was revealed in a memorable scene in which she removed a magical necklace and became an aged, wrinkled crone in front of our eyes.
Carice says now the most frequent thing Game of Thrones fans say to her when they meet her is, ‘You’re really pretty in real life.’
‘I’m always like, “Thank you. I guess?”’ she adds.
Today, Carice arrives for our interview at a London hotel looking much younger than her 40 years. She’s wearing black jeans and a beanie hat with thick-framed glasses that seem slightly too large for her elfin face. She moves with an adolescent mixture of gawkiness and elegance.
She’s lost weight recently because she’s breastfeeding her 11-month-old son, Monte (her first child with the actor Guy Pearce).
‘It’s literally taking all my good stuff, which is great, I want that for him,’ she says. ‘But there’s nothing left of my legs.’
It has been a gruelling time for Carice. She gave birth six weeks before shooting began on this series of Game of Thrones. ‘Yeah, it was not great timing,’ she says. In between takes, she would express her milk while still in costume. Everyone on set was trying to make it as easy as possible, but she was aware that she was holding up filming.
‘It doesn’t really work when you have pressure and you don’t have the baby with you… So I had a little bit of a breakdown one day when I was with Emilia [Clarke, who plays Daenerys Targaryen]. I burst out crying and said, “I want to go home to my baby.” You’re just completely full of hormones.’
Filming eventually wrapped at the beginning of this year, but then Carice had to launch straight into publicity duties. We meet in May, when she’s in London as part of a promotional tour of interviews, photo shoots and fan conventions. Monte is travelling with her, and is being looked after by a nanny while we talk. She’s exhausted, but, she says, ‘I don’t want to come across like I’m complaining.’
Any attempt to get her to say what might be happening in this series is doomed to fail. All the cast have been made to sign non-disclosure agreements, knowing any slip up will have the internet ablaze with rumours and plot spoilers. Game of Thrones is a broadcasting phenomenon. It has made stars of many of its cast: Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams and Peter Dinklage.
The viewing figures for the last series averaged an eye-popping 25.1 million. Based on the books by George RR Martin, what should have been a nerdy fantasy tale with dragons and giants has snowballed into one of the most-watched television series of all time. People have their theories about why the show seems to have struck such a chord.
My own is that, once you get past the silly bits, Game of Thrones is exceptional storytelling, bringing together a Dickensian hotchpotch of characters, gripping plot lines and female roles that are unapologetically kickass. Sure, there’s a fair amount of nudity and sex, but there are also bigger themes exploring the corruption of power and family dysfunction.
The show has created a legion of devoted fans. When Melisandre orchestrated the burning at the stake of a young girl in season five, Carice received death threats on Twitter. ‘There are people who take it a little bit too seriously,’ she says. Later, Melisandre was shown resurrecting the show’s hero, Jon Snow (played by Kit Harington), and suddenly people were tweeting her marriage proposals instead.
Even her mother, Margje, was pleased. ‘Yeah, my mum had a little bit of a crush,’ Carice laughs. But for all her success in the role, when Carice was initially sent the scripts for the second series of GoT, she had her reservations.
She is a well-known actress in her native Netherlands, where she has won five Golden Calf awards (the Dutch equivalent of the Baftas) for her work in film and television, and had already starred in several English-language films, including Repo Men, The Fifth Estate and Valkyrie, opposite Tom Cruise. She met Guy Pearce when they were both filming the critically lauded 2016 western Brimstone.
In Holland, she’s also an acclaimed musician: when Carice starred in the Paul Verhoeven-directed Black Book in 2006, she sang four songs on the soundtrack. Despite her success back home, Carice has something of an independent spirit, so a sprawling fantasy franchise, which would require her to learn an entirely fictional language (Valyrian) and portray a priestess several hundred years old, did not immediately seem like a natural fit.
‘It’s not very appealing to me, the whole magic thing,’ she admits.
That attitude changed when she spoke to comedian and chat-show host Seth Meyers, a friend from when he used to live in Amsterdam in the ’90s. ‘He loves that kind of stuff and when I asked, “Do you think this is something for me?” He said, “You’re crazy! That’s one of the greatest shows and you should totally do that.”’ She grins.
The part of Melisandre has catapulted Carice to a different level of fame – she is now filming Domino, a major suspense thriller directed by Brian De Palma and starring another GoT star, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister).
Yet she guards her privacy fiercely, and refuses to post any pictures of her son on social media, ‘because I cannot ask him if he’s all right with that… But there are so many moments in the day when I feel, “Ah, if only people knew how cute he is!”’
When she goes out in Amsterdam, where she and Guy live, she wears tracksuit bottoms and glasses – ‘a really good way of hiding myself’.
And when I ask her about her relationship with Guy, she’s polite but non-committal: she says she wants to talk about how great he is, but ‘I get carried away’. One of Carice’s heroines is the Swedish actress Greta Garbo, who famously retired from public life at the age of 35, declaring she wanted to be left alone.
Fame, says Carice, ‘is a mind f—. As much as it has great sides to it – you know, free stuff, and if you call a restaurant they’ll make sure that you have a table – it also makes you insecure, funnily enough. You’re like, “But if I wasn’t famous you wouldn’t have done that for me, so it’s nothing to do with who I am.” That can kind of separate you from yourself.’
The love of Garbo comes from a wider interest in black and white films. Her father, Theodore, a writer and broadcaster, was ‘a silent-film connoisseur’, and when Carice and her younger sister, Jelka, were little they were raised watching silent films.
The actress has been left with an abiding love of what she describes as ‘non-verbal art’, particularly Laurel and Hardy. It was what made her want to be an actress and she ended up attending the Kleinkunstacademie Theaterschool in Amsterdam before landing her first professional role.
To this day, she prefers scenes with no dialogue, which partly explains why her performance as Melisandre is so hypnotic, even when she’s not speaking. Carice’s father, with whom she was very close, died last year of cancer.
‘Yeah,’ she says sadly. ‘I was almost five months pregnant [when he died]… I think he knew he was not going to live to see Monte, so I feel like he couldn’t really connect too much [with my pregnancy] because I think it was too painful for him.’
Her father watched a bit of Game of Thrones, but, as a film historian, preferred his daughter in movies. ‘He always thought that I needed to be in a better film,’ she smiles. ‘But yeah, he was very proud.’
Still, the nudity in the show would be fairly relentless for any parent to sit through. Carice’s character has had her fair share of energetic sex scenes. Did she ever feel uncomfortable with that?
‘In Melisandre’s case, I think I can justify it because she uses sexuality as a weapon… she’s trying to manipulate. I find it hypocritical that we can show people with their heads blown off, then there’s one nipple and viewers get upset. That’s the thing that I struggle with… you don’t have sex with a bra on. I just want to normalise it.
‘I would struggle more with my own vanity at this point to undress,’ she continues, ‘because I feel way less secure about my body, especially after giving birth and having turned 40.’ Does she worry about ageing in an industry that is so guided by looks? She nods. ‘With auditions I find sometimes that if I don’t get something, then I do think, “Am I just too old?” And it’s unfair because men don’t have that problem.’
She pauses, then adds, ‘I don’t want to give into that whole thing and do something to my face just to keep working, but at the same time, this is what the industry has become. It’s tricky. And I really don’t know yet what I’m going to do about it. I wish I could say I love every line on my face.’
I don’t think I’ve heard such an honest answer from an actress about the ageing process. But then, as someone who plays a 300-year-old priestess, I suppose Carice has had more time to think about it than most.
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