Curtain Call: Natalie Dormer

"“You can’t have three people in a marriage!” -Natalie Dormer as Anne Boleyn in The Tudors."

Natalie Dormer has said that when she was cast as Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones, it was cementing her as a period piece actress, endlessly playing Anne Boleyns. But showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss convinced her it that was not so simple, and that the Margaery we would see onscreen was far more expansive than the Margaery we met on the page.

In George R.R. Martin’s novels, Margaery is a blank canvas of a character that everyone else projects their own insecurities onto. Is it because she’s playing the game that hard? Or are other people seeing what they want to see? In the books, it remains ambiguous. But on screen, Dormer took Margaery Tyrell and turned her into one of the strongest female characters in the series. She was a girl raised from birth to play the Great Game, and trained by her grandmother Olenna, who is so good at the game she’s now the only person from her generation left alive in the series. Dormer immediately gave shape to the character the very first time we saw her cheering on her brother lustily from the stands as her king, Renly, sat back and meekly observed.

She then went on to shock viewers everywhere by attempting to seduce her gay husband by inviting said brother into their bed. If that’s what it took to get her pregnant with a royal heir, that’s what she’d do. Her ambition far outstripped her king’s, and came to define her character: she didn’t just want to be a queen. She wanted to be the queen.

But although Margaery was raised to play the game, she never quite accounted for the insanity of Cersei Lannister. In the fight for power, Margaery’s weapons were words. After all, as Olenna taught her, words are what women have—gossip and whispers in the right ears; suggestions to one’s husband after sex, or at least after sexily posing with a crossbow; snarky and cruel jabs at one’s enemies, delivered with a smile.

This was Margaery’s game, and she would have won if Cersei had met her on her own turf. As we saw in Season 5, after Margaery’s third marriage (and first bedding) to a king, Dormer famously put Cersei down so hard that the Queen Mother barely staggered out of the room.

“Can we bring you anything to eat or drink? I wish we had some wine for you. It’s a bit early in the day for us.”

But Margaery’s fatal mistake was overlooking that not every woman raised to play the game played on this field. She might pity Sansa, who was not raised to play, and smirk at Cersei, who could not function on her level. (Dormer’s smirks are legendary.) But she was not prepared for someone who was wiling to murder to get what they wanted, or make deals with the devil. Cersei first took Margaery down by making a deal with the High Sparrow. Margaery thought she had outwitted Cersei by making the smarter deal—the one where words could be dropped strategically, and the High Sparrow brought into some level of control.

But she never counted on Cersei’s willingness to burn it all down, and rain her own version of fire and blood upon her enemies, the consequences be damned. Although Dormer got to play a character whose instincts were right until the end, instincts only count for so much when your adversary is insane.

Margaery Tyrell would have been the most interesting character to see interact with Daenerys. Sadly, it was not to be. Instead she perished, along with her entire family (save Olenna), because she never understood the third person in her marriage, and her enemy, until it was too late.