Game of Thrones earned a reputation early on in its run for delivering audiences copious amounts of sex and violence, though the countless instances of sexual abuse and harassment the #MeToo movement unearthed in the industry has caused actress Carice Van Houten to analyze the scenes in which she appeared nude under a different lens. While she didn’t express that she suffered direct harassment on the series, she noted that the past few years have seen her reflecting on those experiences with a fresh perspective, ultimately leading her to wonder why some of those scenes seemingly required her to be nude.
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“When the #MeToo movement started, that’s when it started sinking in for me,” Van Houtenrevealed to Insider. “And it did sort of change my perspective on my whole career, not just Game of Thrones. 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.”
While her opinion of nude scenes might have changed over the years, she did note that the experience of being nude in the series did inspire her to create a production company whose goal was to deliver female-oriented stories with female perspectives.
“I became very aware of the male gaze, and that’s also why, during that process, me and my friend Halina Reijn [director] made Instinct, very much inspired by that,” the actress noted of her new endeavors. “We sort of made it into a dogma where we are done with that [nudity]. We don’t need to show nudity to create intimacy, we don’t need to see breasts.”
The actress recalls that the scenes themselves were somewhat empowering, expressing, “I was always very liberal and I defended nudity because I thought, ‘Why can you have a machine gun and not see a nipple?’ I thought it was so weird.” However, she has since seen herself “confronting my own feeling of ‘that’s what the audience wants’ and not feeling confident to say, ‘Wait a minute, why would I have to do that?’ It’s just our conditioned behavior as females, and not thinking about what that means.”
Van Houten isn’t the only one whose views about nude scenes changed over the years, as actress Emilia Clarke, who had a number of nude scenes in the series, previously detailed how all of those scenes impacted all subsequent projects going forward, revealing on the Armchair Expert podcast, “I have had fights onset before when I am like, ‘No, sheet stays up.’ And they are like ‘You don’t want to disappoint your Game of Thrones fans.’ And I’m like ‘F— you.’”
There are currently multiple Game of Thrones spinoffs being developed.
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