Playing a 300-year-old priestess in Game of Thrones may have catapulted Carice van Houten to international success
There are plenty of despicable villains in Game of Thrones, it’s part of what makes it such a great story.
Joffrey Baratheon, Cersei Lannister, Ramsay Bolton, the list goes on and on.
We love the show just as much as anyone but when frenzied fans fail to spot the difference between actors and fictional characters it takes things a little bit too far.
Carice van Houten (Melisandre) has opened up about shocking death threats she received over the show.
In an interview with the Telegraph, van Houten reveals that she received the vile abuse over Twitter after the episode in which the Red Priestess burned Stannis Baratheon’s daughter Shireen as a sacrifice.
To be fair she took it a lot better than plenty of people would have, simply saying “there are people who take it a little bit too seriously”.
She received a very different kind of crazy attention after Melisandre’s most famous scene, in which she resurrected Jon Snow, when fans started sending her marriage proposals.
The 40-year-old also said it took some convincing for her to accept the role in the first place, even though Game of Thrones was already huge at the time (although not the phenomenon it is today).
She said: “It’s not very appealing to me, the whole magic thing.”
Nice.
Carice van Houten
Dutch actress
caricevanhouten.nl
Carice Anouk van Houten is a Dutch actress and singer. She was born to writer and theatre-radio producer Theodore van Houten in Leiderdorp, the Netherlands. Her younger sister Jelka is also an actress.
Born: September 5, 1976 (age 41 years), Leiderdorp, Netherlands
Height: 1.68 m
Partner: Guy Pearce (2015–)
Children: Monte Pearce
Siblings: Jelka van Houten