If there’s anything left of Game Of Thrones‘ lasting legacy after that horrendous final season, it’s the number of sex scenes and nudity it managed to shoehorn in during its early years. Carice van Houten, who played Melisandre, had her fair share of sex scenes and getting her nude on for the show, and it’s now something she seemingly regrets following the dawning of the #MeToo era.
Speaking of MeToo, the GOAT team talk about what’s next after Harvey Weinstein’s conviction on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
Chatting to Insider about her sex scenes on Game Of Thrones, Carice van Houten says #MeToo has made her question why Melisandre even needed to be nude in the first place and how the movement made her more aware of the ‘male gaze‘ not just for the show but for her whole career.
“In retrospect, I thought, ‘Why did that scene have to be nude? Why was that normal?’ I did question things and it was not so much that I was blaming anyone, but that’s just how we evolved, and just how the movement affected me.
“It was not so much that I was blaming anyone, but that’s just how we evolved, and just how the movement affected me … My consciousness is bigger. I’m a bit more woke.”
Fair point. Carice’s retrospective view on the sex scenes in Game Of Thrones certainly has echoes of the criticism that was leveled towards the sheer amount of nudity present in the show’s early seasons and how this unfortunately ushered in the ‘sexposition‘ technique – i.e combining plot points with sexytimes to keep viewers hooked.
Her experience with nudity and sex scenes on Game Of Thrones, combined with the #MeToo movement, has shaped how Carice approaches nude stuff for future projects.
Getting naked is fine if it serves a narrative function, but Carice is done with nudity for nudity’s sake (“I’ve done that enough now. No more.”), something that felt like the case at times on Game Of Thrones.
While most of us walked away from Game Of Thrones with a sense of utter disappointment, much respect to Carice van Houten for publicly saying something important about how unnecessary nudity can be on TV, as well as being one of the few people to somehow find a silver lining in the show’s lousy final season.
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