Curtain Call: Essie Davis

Essie Davis had worked on the stage and screen for years before she got her big break in 2014’s The Babadook, where she played a widow dealing with both a volatile young son and a supernatural horror. That role, which got her nominated for several prestigious acting awards, may have been what brought her to the attention of the Game of Thrones producers, but it was probably her time with the Bell Shakespeare company that helped her most when playing Lady Crane, the leading lady of a traveling theater troupe. We spent a surprising amount of time watching Davis play Crane play Cersei in a performance of The Tragedy of the Good King Joffrey Baratheon (not a real title), and her familiarity with rhyming couplets and medieval verse surely came in handy.

Of all the theater troupers, the role of Lady Crane was the most robust, and Davis did a lot with it in a short amount of time. We may not have seen many of the other performers perform, but it was clear that Crane, at least, was a genuinely good actress. In “No One,” she performed a reworked version of the speech Cersei gives after her son dies, and was so convincingly grief-stricken that I actually felt bad for Cersei for a moment. Lean Headey is Cersei Lannister, but if the someone wanted to remake the series from scratch right now, Davis would be a good choice in the role.

A shame, then, that Lady Crane made like so many other Game of Thrones characters and died just as we were getting to like her. All of her offstage scenes with Arya were affecting. Crane had a combination of maternal warmth and hard-edged world-weariness that appealed to a headstrong person like Arya, who at bottom is still just a young girl who misses her parents. The scenes of Arya convalescing in Lady Crane’s bed in “No One” gave her a chance to feel a little like a kid again for the first time in ages, and we have Lady Crane to thank for that.

I’m not sure precisely what the Waif did to Lady Crane in her final moments, but that last shot made it look like she died painfully. Sorry, Lady Crane. You got wrapped up in something too big for you, but you put on a good show while you could.