The more we hear about what Margaery Tyrell will be up to on Season 6 of Game of Thrones, the less we seem to know. Natalie Dormer, who’s still hitting the interview trail to promote her horror movie The Forest, talked to Vulture recently, and discussed the difficult place Margaery will be in come April 24, when Season 6 premieres.
"Without giving too much away, in season six, you’re really going to see Margaery in a predicament where she genuinely is fearful, and she absolutely has no idea how to get herself out of it…You’re like, Has this woman really been changed by everything that’s happened to her? Finally, after all these years in King’s Landing, has it broken her? Has something genuinely shifted here? Because she’s out of her depth, finally, and losing her grip a bit."
Based purely on what we last saw Margaery doing at the end of Season 5, this makes sense. The High Septon had put her in holy prison for committing perjury, she had swapped her beautiful gowns for a brown sack, and she’d sunk low enough to abandon propriety and tell Cersei exactly what she thought of her. It’s not hard to imagine this woman losing her grip as her ordeal continues.
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The issue is that this account clashes with some of the earlier things Dormer has said. First of all, we know Margaery gets out of holy jail in Episode 6—Jaime comes with a Tyrell army at his back to escort her away from the Sept of Baelor. If the show follows the books even roughly, this doesn’t mean that Margaery is off the hook. It just means that she’ll be out on bail, so to speak, while she waits for her trial to begin.
According to early rumors, the High Sparrow releases Margaery into the custody the Tyrells because he has successfully broken her. Apparently, she becomes an adherent to the High Sparrow’s particular fanatic branch of the Faith of the Seven. That would certainly qualify as her “losing her grip a bit.”
But in an interview in Women’s Health a couple months back, Dormer painted a different picture. “Margaery is a savvy chick and she’s trying to find an angle,” she said. “She’s trying to find a way to get out of that cell so it’s pretty amusing and ingenious the route she decides to take.”
Margaery does something amusing and ingenious to get herself released? That sounds like the savvy, scheming Margaery we know. The implication of this quote is that Margaery fakes a religious awakening to spring herself from prison. That doesn’t sound like someone who’s out of her depth.
So which is it? Given the conflicting information, I suppose we won’t know for sure until we see the show, which is probably for the best. We’ll discover it along with everyone else.
Dormer also talks quite a bit about The Forest in the Vulture interview, including the difficulty of playing identical twins (she acted against herself in at least one scene), acting opposite costar Taylor Kinney, and how liberating it is “to look rough, disheveled, and broken, to be free from looking good!” Apparently, that’s something her Forest character shares in common with Season 6 Margaery.
It’s too bad The Forest has received such rancid reviews, but most of the critics concede that Dormer gives a good performance. And it’s already made back its $10 million budget and then some, so we’ll just call this a win and move on.