Lena Headey

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 sarcasm that could easily be mistaken for sincerity. At one point she leans over and motions towards a Stella Vine painting on the wall, a garish portrait of a man wearing glasses and a perturbed expression, and says, “That’s how I feel most mornings.” One of her many tattoos is a Pema Chödrön quote inked in a black serif font on her ribs that reads: “Can’t we just return to the bare bones, can’t we just come back.” She talks animatedly about her current cultural highlights: the American TV series Transparent (“it’s funny and charming and everyone’s fucked up”); Shane Meadows’ film saga This Is England (“brave and exciting”); the 2011 film Tyrannosaur (“fucking dark as shit but incredible”); and a book she’s currently trying to get hold of about chain-smoking, cross-dressing matriarchs in Turkey. Ten minutes after I leave, my phone flashes with a text – a screenshot of the IMDB webpage for the Ukrainian film The Tribe, a disturbing portrayal of a violent uprising at a boarding school for the deaf that Headey had recommended but forgotten the name of.

Born in Bermuda in 1973, Headey grew up in Somerset and then Yorkshire. Her first acting role – playing a young Mary Crick in an adaptation of Graham Swift’s 1983 novel Waterland, alongside Jeremy Irons and a 15-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal – led to her securing a role in James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day, which went on to receive eight Academy Award nominations. Later there was Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm and 300, a blockbuster retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae between Persia and Greece. The film grossed $70m in three days. More recently, she played Sarah Connor in the television spin-off of the Terminator films, and ruthless drug lord Madeline Madrigal in a remake of violent metropolis dystopia Dredd.

“I really like to go for an ugly – not ugly, I hate saying that – but somebody who’s driven by something other than being granted access for beauty,” says Headey. “There’s such a high value on beauty still, more than anything. I’m acutely aware of it, that hasn’t changed.” There’s a gender divide in that too, I suggest. “Yeah, there are successful men who aren’t conventionally beautiful. You begin to go, I think you’re beautiful because you’re incredible, and I don’t think the same is offered to women.”

Headey’s ability to deconstruct the pristine, immaculate looks that betray so many performances is perhaps what makes her so rewarding to watch. There’s often an element of humour behind the gravity of her characters too, delivered through the nuanced arch of an eyebrow or a glinting eye. “I do love playing camp villains,” she admits with a laugh. Scripts she receives, she says, are rarely earthshattering, but her solution to that is to actively create these roles, rather than wait for them to be delivered. Having recently acquired the rights to H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s moving memoir about the year she spent rearing a goshawk in the aftermath of her father’s sudden death, Headey plans to re-imagine it for the screen, taking on both creative and performing roles. “It’s just got this shattering simplicity about it,” she says. There’s simplicity too, in Headey’s own creative process as a performer, which seems both modest and pragmatic. She often watches herself back, but only as a means of self-editing and improvement. “Sometimes when you’re feeling what you’re feeling, it doesn’t necessarily translate,” she explains. She works from her own emotional history, and often likes to visualise an entire fictional history arc for the characters she plays. Roles, she adds, are getting more interesting as she gets older. “Who knew women were interesting? Especially after 40.”

‘I LOVE THE DARKNESS AND BY THAT I JUST MEAN BROKEN PEOPLE’

A lot of female roles are so often defined by their gendered bylines: as wives, mothers, daughters. In Game of Thrones, Cersei’s femininity is wielded both as an aside to her position as a conniving anti-heroine, and as a means of manipulation. “Tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon; the best one’s between your legs,” she advises a young female protagonist, Sansa Stark, in an early episode. But it is also her roles as wife, mother and daughter that give the character empathy. “I think everybody, even the darkest of the dark, must have a glimmer of light there,” Headey says. “And that’s intriguing too, taking someone despicable and somehow making their empathy universally appealing. I quite like that. I don’t want to set out to make a character liked, but it’s quite interesting when you start to feel sorry for someone. I just play it honestly. It’s just what I see.”

Is she ever driven by fear? “Maybe.” Headey pauses to consider. “I just think I go for things that have depth, that I can get lost in. I love the darkness, and by that I just mean broken people. The emotional journey is what I love. I’m more scared about reading, ‘She’s beautiful’, because I don’t want that pressure, I don’t want to do it. I did that when I was younger. I had no idea when I was starting out, I just thought, ‘I have to say yes to that lipstick.’ I can’t be arsed with it now. I can’t sit there thinking, ‘Am I good enough?’ because for me that’s an exercise in vanity. I’m drawn to the truth and ugliness and the dark. More interesting things.”

She refers to a recent interview with Nicole Kidman in which the actress recalled a friend once telling her she couldn’t get into acting because she wasn’t a very good liar. Kidman had responded by saying it was exactly the opposite. “That’s exactly how I feel,” says Headey. “Lying is bad acting. You see it; it’s painful to watch. It always makes me giggle.”

Game of Thrones is part of a larger renaissance being enjoyed by American television. Compared with the overbearing white hegemony that still permeates much of cinema, its increasing receptiveness to diversity both on and off screen has provided a platform for interesting, complex narratives. As the director Steve McQueen recently pointed out, in the case of film, an actor or director invites audiences into the public sphere of the cinema to experience what they’re presenting; whereas with television the viewer plays the role of the host, within the private sphere of the home. There’s something interesting about this reversal of power and the shift in vulnerability that comes with that. The cult following Game of Thrones enjoys, Headey agrees, is possibly a direct result of this intimate relationship between character and audience, and the way it’s compacted between day-to-day mundane existence.

It would be easy to settle into the security that comes with being part of such cultural institutions as HBO, but Headey, who currently lives in LA, admits that she’s still drawn to the distinct grit of British film. “Dirty old indies, that’s what I grew up in,” she says. “I miss what I feel like we once did really well, that honesty. There’s a heartbeat here. Even coming back here and walking around it just lights me up. That’s what translates into our films, or it did. I think it’s still there, there’s people still pushing that Brit flick. That’s what I love and admire. Then we got all a bit soft and middle class. I think we started to make money by putting films into America, and the market for that wants really posh English people who have lots of issues.”

Headey has previously described herself as a publicist’s nightmare, though she says that she’s now finding it increasingly less difficult to be forthright. “I don’t care any more,” she says. “What I love about someone like Maisie Williams,” she adds, referring to her 18-year-old Game of Thrones costar, “is that she’s at such a young age and she’s grabbed social media and her position. She’s using it for great causes. I just cheer her on, it’s brilliant. She isn’t bending to any expectation of her gender. I love that about her.”

“On the shoot yesterday it was great,” she continues, “because no one was going, ‘It’s a soft dress and a soft lip.’ I feel really fake when I’m sat in a gown and someone’s facing you asking you to do a wistful look. I can’t fucking do it.”

This outspoken nature lends itself to good causes too; a cursory scroll through Headey’s Twitter feed, followed by more than half a million people, reveals, between tweets about jetlag and nipple tassels, links to fundraisers for Syrian refugees and petitions to ban SeaWorld from breeding captive orcas. She’s appeared in campaigns for NOH8 and Peta. In May this year, she penned an open letter to her then unborn daughter, embracing her freedom of choice and calling for a wider attention to human rights for girls and women across the globe. “Geography dictates my freedom as a woman, geography and the women before us who fought for our equal political voice,” she wrote. “The inequality that is all too prevalent all over the world is so great and so frightening. We owe it to our sisters who have no voice, and no chance to be heard, to speak up.” She reiterates her point today. “Human ‘rights’, that word in itself says it all,” she says. “There’s a requirement there. There’s still a long way to go worldwide, but we’re really entering a new generation of thinking. If either of my children turns out to be gay or feel like they’re in the wrong body, there’s no shame there, I won’t allow it. That makes me really happy.”

‘GEOGRAPHY DICTATES MY FREEDOM AS A WOMAN AND THE WOMEN BEFORE US WHO FOUGHT FOR OUR VOICE’

I’m interested in Headey’s thoughts about inequality within her own industry, particularly the Hollywood gender pay gap, highlighted by last year’s Sony hacks that began a lengthy, tumultuous dialogue on the matter; and a recent statement by Jennifer Lawrence about the fact that female actresses often fail to negotiate contractual wages so as not to seem spoilt or greedy. Headey is quick to make jokes about male to female nudity ratios, before getting serious. “It’s horrid,” she says. “But I think pay grades in other occupations are far more frightening. I’m such a lucky fucker. Thrones has allowed me financial security and allowed me to help people I love, buy a home. I don’t know… There are other issues. I’m very aware that I’m treated differently. Completely and utterly. If an actor’s a twat, oh he’s just being a bloke, but if a woman stands up for herself because something is unfair or she needs some help, she’s being difficult. I remember Monica Bellucci saying to me once, something along the lines of, ‘I’d rather be thought of as a bitch and get what I need.’ At the time I was like, ‘Fuck, those are harsh words,’ but now I understand what she meant. She doesn’t seek to be loved by everyone, she’s like, ‘I just want to be treated fairly.’ And yeah, I think to a point, if you’re young and you’re considered beautiful everybody fawns over you, but as you get older you become more invisible and therefore when you are demanding then you’re a bitch. Youth and beauty, and often being a man, seem to erase that.”

Even if the looming threat of invisibility is a pressing one, it won’t be holding Headey back any time soon. “There are a lot of things I want to do,” she says. “I want to open a florist and a vintage shop. I also want to direct and produce, and I’m seriously laying the foundations for that. I feel like I’ve got a lot to say through film, and possibly documentaries. A lot drives me and keeps me up at night; things that concern me. My brain doesn’t stop. It’s endless, and now as I’m getting older, I think, I should have thought about that earlier. I was probably attracted to this for very naive reasons. I thought, oh god, this would be amazing, and then it became my job, and now I just have to find what interests me. But it’s just a job.” A beat passes, before she adds, “First and foremost I am a mum, and that overrides everything.”