BELFAST, Northern Ireland, June 15 (UPI) — There isn’t much that can prepare Game of Thrones fans for the scenes that rocked the season finale of the HBO series.
Having to walk naked before a crowd of thousands screaming: “Liar! Slut! Whore!” after being beaten is enough to devastate anyone.
Even if that someone is Cersei Lannister.
In the season five finale of the HBO hit series, Cersei was subjected to a cruel walk of shame as a result of years of her conniving and scheming ways. The scene was set up to be so brutal and disturbin’ that even Cersei haters would be forced to sympathize with her.
In an interview with The LA Times actress Lena Headey, who plays the character, conveyed that the Queen turned prisoner is “incredibly clever, so she can manipulate most things to her advantage, but…she’s made very poor choices.”
The Emmy nominated actress even grieved for her character in an interview with Entertainment Weekly saying: “There’s a part of you that’s [explicit] terrified. I can’t even imagine people wanting your blood. Cersei has done wrong, but she doesn’t really deserve this.”
Headey continues by saying: “She’s been beaten and starved and humiliated. She thinks when she comes out and confesses that this is it — even when she’s on her knees [confessing to the High Sparrow], she’s partly lying. She thinks she’s good to go. She has no idea what’s coming when she walks out to the steps, or that they’re going to shave her hair off like Aslan.”
Headey also said that the scene was difficult to shoot.
Although a body double was used for the full frontal nude shot, the actress still had to trudge through the vicious mud-slinging crowd repeatedly in order to convey Cersei’s emotional journey from utter devastation to unforeseen strength (when she is raised up by The Mountain, her revived savior).
“It’s not hard when people are screaming at you and you look like [explicit],” Headey said. “To figure out how that would feel.”
The grueling scene took three days to shoot in Dubrovnik, Croatia in the city’s Old Town district. Though finding the right location proved difficult at first, show runner David Benioff said that such issues were common while producing the show and that things usually end up “working out.”
Like many of the show’s concepts, the penance walk was readapted based on actual medieval practices. Author George R.R. Martin told the magazine he adapted the scene for his novel A Dance with Dragons (2011), based on the walk the mistress of King Edward IV did shortly after the king died.
Headey even explained that such public humiliation against women isn’t just a thing of the past. “They still do it now,” Headey said. “They take women out and stone them to death.”
Viewers will have to wait to see the fate of Cersei and the rest of the Thrones characters since the finale also marked the end of Martin’s published “A Song of Ice and Fire” book series. The sixth novel of the series is reportedly in the works and will be entitled “The Winds of Winter.”
Though she doesn’t know what the future holds for Cersei, Headey believes that the character “has some people to kill” before she meets her fate.
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