COVER STORY
Lena Headey
Game of Thrones. Sarah Connor. Pema Chödrön. The Brothers Grimm. Photographs Alan Clarke Styling Mark Anthony Bradley Words Sophie Coletta Hair Bianca Tuovi at CLM Hair & Make-up using Bumble and Bumble Make-up Jo Frost at CLM Hair & Make-up using Nars Cosmetics
Lena Headey arrives at London’s Groucho Club carrying a baby harness and a handbag full of rye bread, a fact she nonchalantly shrugs off with a grin, saying, “All the things one might need,” before folding herself into one of the maple-coloured sofas. It’s the morning after the photoshoot for this piece, a long day on the streets of east London. Headey is in good spirits, but having arrived here on the tube, she’s feeling weary of voyeuristic commuters. It’s a predicament that comes with starring in one of the most popular television shows of the moment. “It still feels really weird to be stared at,” she says. Headey is no stranger to being a subject of the gaze. During the final episode of the latest season of Game of Thrones, which aired earlier this year, her character Cersei Lannister – stripped naked and relieved of her long blonde hair – was subjected to a penance walk through the streets of her hometown, while being pelted
with rotting fruit, spit and four-letter words by hundreds of onlookers. Filmed in the tourist-filled city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, where the HBO series predominantly shoots between spells in a studio in Belfast, Headey spent three 14-hour days filming the eightminute sequence. Soon after the scenes were aired, it emerged she had used a body double, Rebecca Van Cleave – a revelation that was met with bizarre outrage from some of the show’s fans, who declared they had been denied an authentic depiction. “I have my reasons,” Headey says of her decision. “I’m such an emotional being that I knew if I was naked, really and truly, I would have just got really aggressive. I would have felt deeply protective of myself.” She scrunches her face into an antagonistic expression and seems to swell to twice her size. “I would have been like that about it – ‘What are you fucking looking at?’ It would have got to me. And I didn’t want Cersei to be like that, because
it’s the one moment where she is like, ‘What is happening to me?’ So Rebecca was able to have whatever face she needed to get through that because she was naked, and I was able to use my being and my face to convey what I believe Cersei was thinking.” It’s significant that Headey is willing to admit the limitations of human expression when often we expect so much of those living out the narratives on our screens. “I think I learn by watching people,” Headey says. “Like, seeing something and thinking, I don’t want to become that. Some actors get a terrifying amount of money for doing films, and sometimes they become these narcissistic people who think they’re anointed because of it.” Headey is a lot of things over the course of our conversation – gregarious, outspoken, delicately funny and serious – but never once gives any impression of superiority. Her responses are often littered with self-deprecation, or biting >