Lena Headey has said she was stunned by the anger from some Game of Thrones viewers after they learned she used a body double for Cersei Lannister's nude walk of atonement. The British actor, who earned five Emmy nominations for playing the ruthless queen, said critics appeared to believe she had deceived them by not performing the nudity herself.
Speaking in a 16 July interview while promoting her new BBC audio drama Intimacy, Headey recalled the reaction to the season five finale, which first aired in June 2015. 'I was really shocked by the anger, by this idea that I'd duped the audience', she said, adding that the sequence involved an enormous crowd and came after the cast had become globally recognisable.
Why Lena Headey Used a Body Double
The scene shows a shorn Cersei forced to walk naked through King's Landing as onlookers insult her, throw food and chant 'shame'. Headey performed Cersei's facial expressions and emotional journey while actor Rebecca Van Cleave completed the nude walk. Their work was combined through visual effects to create the finished six-minute sequence, which was filmed over three days in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
Headey said her decision was about protecting the emotional focus of the performance , not an objection to appearing nude on screen. She explained that being exposed before thousands of people would have placed her in 'full-on defensive mode'. She believed the pressure would have prevented her from fully performing Cersei's humiliation and emotional collapse.
The actor had previously addressed the same criticism after viewers suggested using a double made her less committed to the role. 'I've done nudity. I'm not averse to it', she said in an earlier interview. Headey explained that filming naked for three days would have pushed her towards anger, while the scene required Cersei to move through shock, vulnerability and defeat.
How Cersei's Walk of Shame Was Filmed
Van Cleave was selected from more than 1,000 applicants and worked closely with Headey to match Cersei's body language. Headey walked beside her between takes, explaining what the character was thinking and how the emotional progression should shape each movement. The production reportedly used 500 extras to create the hostile King's Landing crowd surrounding them.
The body double also defended Headey against claims that the technique weakened the scene. 'It should all be about the finished product, not about whose body was where and whose head was where', Van Cleave said in her account of the shoot. Her comments confirm that both performers contributed distinct parts of the sequence rather than one simply replacing the other.
Headey Connects the Backlash to Industry Pressure
Headey revisited the controversy while discussing Intimacy, an eight-part drama she wrote and stars in for BBC Radio 4. The story follows an intimacy coordinator whose new job brings her face to face with a director connected to past sexual trauma. The full series launched on BBC Sounds on 22 July, with its radio broadcast scheduled to begin on 27 July.
Her comments place the Game of Thrones backlash within a wider conversation about who controls actors' bodies and how safely intimate scenes are made. Headey said younger women entering the industry now appear more confident about refusing work that crosses their boundaries, contrasting that with the expectations she encountered earlier in her career.
More than a decade after Cersei's walk became one of the program's defining images, her account shifts attention from whether audiences saw her body to the emotional and physical labour required to create the scene.
