Lena Headey Admits She Wanted A Better GoT Ending
Fans still aren't happy over the way Game of Thrones ended, and it looks like the cast pretty much agrees.
Lena Headey, who played the inscrutable, cunning Cersei Lannister for the entirety of the show's eight seasons, has admitted that she was unhappy with her character's ending.
Speaking to The Guardian, Headey shared that she wanted a better death for Cersei, which is pretty unsurprising when you remember just how unsatisfying Cersei's fate was. After facing defeat during the siege of King's Landing, Cersei tried to escape the city with her brother-lover, Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), but the two of them wound up crushed to death by rocks under the Red Keep, buried together forever beneath the rubble.
Headey said that she'd like to sit down and have a drink with showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss and hash out a few things about the show's extremely unpopular final season, which suffered from rushed pacing, incomplete storylines, and underwhelming finishes. First on her list of grievances would be to ask about her death scene, which she now thinks was pretty lackluster, even after previously telling Entertainment Weekly that she came to peace with it following a lot of long talks with Coster-Waldau.
"I will say I wanted a better death. Obviously you dream of your death," Headey told The Guardian. "You could go in any way on that show. So I was kind of gutted. But I just think they couldn't have pleased everyone. No matter what they did, I think there was going to be some big comedown from the climb."
Thrones star Maisie Williams, whose character Arya Stark seemed destined to have a showdown with Cersei, also expressed dismay over the finale. She previously stated that her biggest gripe about the series' ending was that the Arya never came face to face.
Throughout Thrones' eight seasons, Cersei was one of the series' most formidable villains. Right from the beginning, as a protective mother to the undeniably evil Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), Cersei engineered some of the most shocking moments of the entire series — many of which were feeble attempts to cover up her ongoing relationship with Jaime (who fathered all three of her children, despite the fact that she passed them off as true-born heirs to the throne). After Joffrey's death on the fourth season, Cersei's vendetta against her other brother, Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), only intensified as she accused him of killing her son, and she spent the rest of Thrones trying to get revenge on him, as well as anyone else who might have wronged her.
However, a few of her own crimes ultimately caught up with her, and after losing two of her children and suffering public humiliation when her affair with her cousin was uncovered (since she likes to keep it in the family, at least she's consistent), Cersei pretty much went off the rails. She blew up the Sept of Baelor during her own trial, committing mass murder that inadvertently led to the death of her youngest son Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman). From chaining up a mother and a daughter to die a slow, agonizing death together to creating her own personal Frankenstein to beheading Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel) just because she could, Cersei was consistently one of the cruelest characters on the show — but thanks to Headey's Emmy-nominated performance, it was still often possible to sympathize with this difficult character.
Despite being one of the show's most important figures, Cersei was stuck firmly on the back burner during the majority of Thrones' final season. Pregnant with another child, the on-again, off-again queen ended up standing around sipping wine and staring out of windows before her death — which felt incredibly anticlimactic considering that Cersei was a keen strategist and a frightening adversary. Headey clearly thought so too, and though Thrones has launched her career to new heights, it's understandable why she, like her fans, would be pretty disappointed over her character's final moments.