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You’d think everyone would be fully wrapped up on a show that constantly warned “Winter is coming,” but that clearly wasn’t the case on Game Of Thrones.
The hit fantasy show featured so much nudity — especially in the early seasons — that it gave rise to the term “sexposition”. Now one of the show’s actors, who was at the centre of many of those nude scenes, looks back on them with a different lens.
Carice van Houten — who played the Red Woman Melisandre — has second thoughts about her Game Of Thrones nudity in light of the Me Too movement, which went viral in 2017 following sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
“When the Me Too movement started, that’s when it started sinking in for me,” Carice recently told Insider. “And it did sort of change my perspective on my whole career, not just Game Of Thrones.”
She added: “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.”
One of van Carice’s nude scenes from the show — season four′s bath scene — is fairly irrelevant to the story and even creates a continuity error: It’s later revealed that Melisandre’s necklace keeps her looking young, yet she clearly isn’t wearing it in the bath.
Carice says she’s now “very aware of the male gaze” and that her 2019 film, Instinct, was inspired by that.
Instinct is the first film from Carice and Instinct director Halina Reijn’s production company, Man Up, which will focus on films told from a female perspective.
The acotr insists she isn’t against nudity in art (though she herself is done with it, Insider reports), but says that it should have narrative relevance.
“My consciousness is bigger. I’m a bit more woke,” Carie said.
Nudity declined noticeably in the final two seasons of Game Of Thrones.
Deadline asked Carice last year if that was a response to Me Too and the changing climate of the industry.
“Yes,” she said. “It also showed that you don’t need it.”