What do you remember about your death scene?
The death scene sucked because it was my death scene, but it was just a long, hot ... it actually wasn't that long a day, but it felt long because I had prosthetics before we started shooting, and then being on set and having to hold that position of hanging from my wrists and not being able to move is really taxing, actually physically a lot harder than I expected to be. So that day was tough, and it was sad, and it was weird. It was a weird way to go, and I was really mad about that. I mean, of all of the people to kill me, the fact that Joffrey killed me is seriously not okay.
But... I recently had dinner with another one of the writers, and he told me about some of the other ideas that got floated for how Ros would meet her grisly end, and actually, the end that I got is better than the alternatives. I'm just gonna put it that way. The death I got, actually, maybe wasn't that bad in comparison.
When people approach you to talk about Game of Thrones, what do they usually ask about?
Usually, I get asked about my theory of who's gonna sit on the Iron Throne - if I know who's going to sit on the Iron Throne. I mean, of course I don't. What it was like doing nude scenes, get asked that a lot. Did I enjoy being on the show? Duh, yeah! Was it fun being on the show? Duh, yeah! Which character I liked the most, who I enjoyed working with the most, a lot of questions. There's not generally one question. There's generally a whole string of questions. Do you still get recognized?
Yeah, it does happen - not as much as when I was still on the show, obviously, now I am somewhat dead, hopefully not forgotten. At the beginning, I was really shocked at random times where I'd be walking down the street in some little in-the-middle-of-nowhere village in Portugal, and somebody shouts, "Game of Thrones!" at me. I'm like, "Okay. That's weird." And Borders and Customs every single time. Border agents love Game of Thrones.
So the generic question you always get asked...
Who do I want to sit on the Iron Throne? I don't really know why anyone would sit on the Iron Throne, personally. I think it causes nothing but trouble, looks damn uncomfortable, but... I don't know, maybe Sansa. Tyrion is kind of the obvious choice, so I don't think it's gonna happen. Even though I would like it to happen, I don't think it's gonna happen. Daenerys? Nah. Varys? Possibly, 'cause I think he's actually - and I might be proven wrong - I actually think he's a really good guy, and I think he really, actually wants the best for the realm. So, we'll see.
How do you think the show will end?
Oh, everyone's dead, for a start. Everyone's gonna die. God, I never thought about the fact that the Night King might sit on the Iron Throne. That might happen. I think that the White Walkers are gonna pretty much wipe everybody out. I think Daenerys is gonna have some weird kind of dragon/Jon Snow baby because everybody knows, if you have sex on television even once, you always get pregnant, unless you're Ros. So that's definitely gonna happen. Maybe that child prodigy, whatever it is, will sit on the throne. Or maybe it will come out and kill them all. How would you like Ros to be remembered?
You know, the thing I've always loved about her character is that she's one of the very few smallfolk of the show. She's like a regular... Westorian? Is that what you call someone from Westeros? She's a regular, everyday Westorian, and she came from these really humble beginnings and worked very hard to do her best and better herself, but she never had any aspirations of power or royalty. She just wanted to create a good life for herself. So, if I say, if anyone was to remember anything, I hope it would be seeing a woman who's just trying to empower herself in a way that's not hurting everyone around her.
What does Game of Thrones mean to you, personally?
What didn't occur to me when I was playing Ros was what she might mean to the kind of people that she was representing. I was doing a convention a couple of years ago, and a woman came up to me, and she said she was a sex worker. She said, "I work as a prostitute, and I've never seen a prostitute character depicted on screen in a way that I can relate to, in any way that I have felt represented me and who I am." She was like, "And you did that because when you played Ros, you weren't just playing a prostitute. You were just playing a character ... this amazing, empowered woman who happened to be a prostitute," and how much that had meant to her.
And, at the time, I was crying when she told me this. It didn't really occur to me why I was so touched by it, and then it really cemented for me a couple of years ago when I realized, "Oh, that's the whole point of why I want to be an actress... " Film and television has done that for me so many times when I've felt alone and misunderstood and I've watched a movie or I've seen a TV show where I'm like, "Oh, someone else gets it!" That's the whole point of art, is to reflect back your own experience to you, and the fact that I could do that, even for one person, means that, for me, I've done my job.
So, that is kind of my takeaway of my experience with Game of Thrones ... It will always be that for me, and I think that's why it's been so popular. For so many people, even though the characters are dealing with very different scale life problems - like most people aren't dealing with, "Oh, crap, there's a ice zombie dragon coming for me" - the themes are still universal. It's still love. It's still power. It's still family. It's all of that stuff, and it's got this amazing diversity of characters, and there's somebody in there that most people can relate to. That is the power of the Thrones.
What do you think the legacy of the show will be?
Game of Thrones has found its way in pop culture in ways that I just am continually amazed by. Like you'll say something and you'll hear someone go, "winter is coming." It's become like a fixture, almost. I just think it's always gonna be remembered as having broken so many boundaries and given people so much to talk about every Sunday night. For more from our "When I Died on Game of Thrones" series, be sure to watch Gethin Anthony talk about the swift rise and unexpected fall of Renly Baratheon.
