Carice van Houten on Guy Pearce and life after Game of Thrones
Her role as Melisandre in Game of Thrones brought her acclaim, but Carice van Houten has been bewitching fans for years.
Carice van Houten is Dutch, but speaks perfect English. However, there is one moment when I really can’t grasp what the 42-year-old actress — known to millions as Melisandre, the red witch of Game of Thrones — is saying. She’s trying to tell me what she doesn’t look like when she’s off-duty. Is it “movie star” — or “monster”? The answer isn’t obvious. Putting aside the fact that, yes, most movie stars are monsters, van Houten has form in both.
As Melisandre, she has seduced and repelled us for the best part of seven years. As she has relentlessly advocated for her god, the Lord of Light, she has alternated between the heinous and the divine: organising the burning to death of a child, Princess Shireen, but reviving the show’s hero, Jon Snow. She has been inordinately sexy, but also revealed herself as a centuries-old hag. Whichever way you cut it, she gives religious fanaticism a certain charm.
This feat isn’t so surprising, though, when you consider that HBO’s great telly saga is just a bracket in a long and illustrious career. She has already been voted the best Dutch actress of all time, and she is the most rewarded in her country’s equivalent of the Baftas, having won the Golden Calf five times, including for Black Book, Paul Verhoeven’s much-loved 2006 war drama. “Never in my life have I worked with an actress this talented,” the director said.
All this, though, is a footnote to the global mania of GoT. When Shireen died, van Houten was tweeted at incessantly: things like “Die, bitch! Die!” When she brought Snow back to life, she got “Melisandre for president!” She remains surprisingly level-headed about it all. “You know, you cannot really take it seriously,” she tuts in what seems a very no-nonsense Dutch way as we talk in the empty restaurant of a London hotel. “But I’ve enjoyed that engagement — in airports, when people just randomly go, ‘Lord of Light!’”
On balance, she was probably saying she doesn’t look like a “movie star”. And today, even after a day of promotional duties, she’s determined to downplay her wattage. The long fitted dress she’s wearing — one pink stripe, one orange stripe and one check, like a particularly stressful Neapolitan ice cream — is topped off by large, round, geeky glasses. “I’m quite a nerdy person in real life,” she confides, saying that her usual style is more “like an orphan girl Annie” or “the female equivalent of Oliver”: long socks, aprons, lace-up boots. “And no long red hair, and no setting shit on fire,” she smiles, keeping Melisandre at a safe distance. What she most obviously has in common with the witch is that remote, laconic delivery, but this may just be an effect of translation.
“I mean, as much as I’m getting used to doing everything in English, I’m exhausted,” she sighs. She speaks English a lot these days, because her partner is Australian actor Guy Pearce and because she has been living in London the past few months, filming a new drama series for Sky. But still. “I cannot be as subtle as I wish, always. And I can’t always hit that punchline in time.”
This feels particularly relevant when you consider that van Houten’s calling card was once comedy. She was astonished to be asked to audition for Melisandre. “I think the things I’m better at are the vulnerable sides of the spectrum — the fears, the doubts, the self-loathing, all the insecure stuff. I can play with that more than I can play with confidence.”
Confidence, though, is a vexed issue for Melisandre as we enter the final phase of the saga. Burning Shireen did nothing for the fortunes of the child’s father, Stannis, and the witch fled as she realised her mistake. Still, in series seven, we saw her reappear, essentially to signpost: “There’s more.” “Ja, my work’s not finished. Sort of,” the actress says warily. She has spent a whole day talking about what she’s not allowed to talk about. I wonder aloud how much she even knows. Is it true about all the different filmed endings? “I have no idea about that,” she starts. “I’ve heard about it. But also, in order not to spoil anything, I like to know as little as possible. So I am gonna be pretty surprised myself, because I didn’t really read it all.”
Hmm. I try a different tack. Last series, she made a few “ta-dah!” appearances, then vanished. Are things more consistent this time? She gives me a little side eye. “Nice try! I’m so good at deflecting that now. I can’t say anything about that.”
What she can say is that it has been a momentous seven years for her, on and off screen. She never saw herself as Melisandre; she didn’t see herself as Cersei Lannister, either, the role she was asked to audition for first. She turned that chance down flat, but saw better the second time. “It makes sense, because they’re sort of the same wood, as we say,” she shrugs. “But it all turned out for the best, because Lena [Headey] couldn’t be a better Cersei.”
It’s hard to imagine another Melisandre now, too, but she admits the part has been hard, especially at the beginning. “I don’t mind playing unsympathetic characters, because they’re often very interesting. But I didn’t get a lot for free. She’s not someone you per se immediately embrace to your heart,” she says with some understatement. “So I had to fight for her. But it was fun. I sort of enjoyed people hating me a little bit. I thought it was funny.”
Eventually, Melisandre has shown “some cracks”, which is more to van Houten’s taste. The unfortunate thing is that it has been by performing awful deeds such as infanticide. That scene feels pivotal still, and arguably more shocking than GoT’s notorious Red Wedding scene. “They showed it,” van Houten nods. “It was quite bold.” She relished the chance. “I remember reading the script for the first time, and I was, like, ‘Oh my God. I have to do this. This is next-level.’” She thinks the boldness of it was good: “It just didn’t get me a lot of sympathy points!” She laughs, then behaves again. “But no, that was terrible, really terrible.”
That sequence matters to van Houten in another way. Once the deed is done, there is a scene in which Melisandre and Stannis are told their horses and men have deserted them; the sacrifice hasn’t worked. “There was a close-up of me realising what I did was a mistake. And those moments in film or in TV are the ones I like to play the most — with no words and just an eyebrow, basically. That, I think, stems from my silent-film upbringing.”
Van Houten’s father, Theodore, was a film historian and musicologist who brought her up on the earliest movies. It had a huge effect on her. “Your body language, your non-verbal communication — I’ve always been interested in that,” she says. “I think I’ve always been an observer.” She owes her name to one of her father’s passions, too. Carice (Car-eese), a mixture of Caroline and Alice, was the name of Edward Elgar’s daughter. Van Houten père was an Elgar obsessive; he was one of the many who tried to decode the “enigma” in the composer’s Enigma Variations. “It was his claim to fame, a little bit,” the younger Carice says. This is all past tense, though, because her father died in 2016. “Oh, I might cry,” she apologises. “Sorry, because I’m tired, and I miss him.” Does she like Elgar? “I like Elgar, it’s beautiful, but oof — it’s bombastic and heavy. And it makes me think of my dad, so it mostly makes me sad.”
Van Houten bagged her first Golden Calf-winning role while still at drama school. She says it helped her immediately see that “it wasn’t about that” — awards, she means. “Which I’m grateful for. Because most of us, and especially actors, we think, ‘Oh, if I have that job! Oh, if I have that dress!’ I mean, I still think shopping can make me happy, and I know it’s nonsense.” Hmm, it can for a bit, can’t it? “It can for a little bit, then it’s gone.”
Still, though: five Golden Calfs. You assume she has learnt that lesson a lot. “Yes, I have. In fact, the last one I got — and this is going to sound, maybe, cocky — I was almost wishing for them to not give it to me, because I thought, ‘Everyone’s gonna hate me’.” Her whole speech was just her saying “Sorry, sorry, sorry”, she says, and she felt a “deep loneliness” afterwards. “I’d rather not be on a pedestal — because the pedestal is high! I wanna play with other people. I don’t wanna be alone.”
I ask if such success, so young, was oppressive at home. (For more than 20 years, she has mostly lived in Amsterdam.) “Ech,” she shrugs. “A little bit. But at the same time, Holland is Holland. It has a very socialistic background, so we’re all afraid of being a diva, you know?” As if on cue, she starts tucking into a huge pile of spaghetti bolognese. The size of it doesn’t bother her, but something else does. “I’m just gonna take my lipstick off,” she announces, delicately wiping her mouth with her napkin, then doggedly getting to work. Anyway. “If you ask for a chair or a trailer in Holland, you’re a diva. We don’t have those. If you see a cable in your way, if the cable guy is not there, you’ll pick it up and just move it.” There’s no hierarchy or class, she says, “which makes everyone quite equal, but it’s also difficult to stand out. And if you do stand out, you feel embarrassed. It’s a weird Calvinistic tendency.”
Game of Thrones has opened doors. One led her to Brimstone, a vicious 2016 western, and to its co-star, Pearce. “He was beating me,” she says. “I mean, I played his wife whom he beat. It was not a romantic storyline at all.” Still, they hit it off. “You know, he was growing an Abraham Lincoln beard, and he was wearing Birkenstocks and shorts — but I immediately liked him.” They have made another film together recently — Domino, a thriller directed by Brian De Palma — and, more important, have a two-year-old son, Monte, whom she rushes to show me pictures of on her phone. “We have such a cute kid,” she says proudly, and it’s true, he’s inordinately cute. Again, a certain level-headed discretion prevails. “Funnily enough, I’ve never, ever posted a picture of him,” she says. “Which is hard, because he’s too cute not to share. But I feel I can’t do it.”
Van Houten says she cried a lot when Thrones wrapped. The show had been the one constant in her life over the past seven years, always returning to Belfast to film (sadly, no Croatian coast for her). Without that crutch, she has various projects on the go: the Sky TV series Temple, and Domino, and a return to Dutch film — she has created a production company with her best friend in Holland.
The obvious question mark is Hollywood, but that’s a place she has always been sceptical of. She made Valkyrie with Tom Cruise; she also did Body of Lies with Leonardo DiCaprio, but all her scenes ended up on the cutting-room floor. That was fine, she says matter-of-factly, but those trailers — so big and empty and lonely. “It’s so boring!” You can be confused by all the spoiling, she says. “It’s not about you as an actor. The fact that you’re being picked up and driven home every day is just to make sure you’re safe, so you can’t do any dumb things! And so they can have you back on the set, and they can control you.” She sounds as world-weary as Melisandre, though thankfully more humorous. “In the end, we’re monkeys.” l
The final series of Game of Thrones begins on April 15.