Rose Leslie joins Good Wife spinoff, Faye Marsay (the Waif) quits social media, and more

Their Game of Thrones characters may be dead, but former cast members soldier on. In fact, they’re doing quite well. For example, Entertainment Weekly reports that Rose Leslie (Ygritte) has joined the cast of CBS’ as-yet-untitled spinoff of The Good Wife, which wrapped earlier this year. Leslie will play Maia, a young lawyer whose reputation is ruined by a financial scandal. Executive producers Robert and Michelle King sound thrilled to have her on board. “We needed a young actress who could hold her own with Christine Baranski and Cush Jumbo, and Rose is perfect,” they said. “She’s real, she’s strong, and she can play comedy. If we designed an actress from the ground up, we couldn’t have done better.”

Not everyone is having quite as rosy a time. Faye Marsay, who played Arya’s nemesis the Waif for two seasons, confessed during a press conference that she quit social media in part because of feedback she received for her performance on Game of Thrones, although it sounds like her problems with Facebook and the like go well beyond that. “I got a lot of shit after Game of Thrones but people were also really nice,” she said.

"I’ve had people trying to figure out who I’m in a relationship with and all that shit … I was a teenager in the ’90s. I didn’t get a mobile phone until I was 15, so for me, this shit scares me as well. I remember the ’90s and nothing was that intrusive … I’ve just come off Facebook three days ago. But I’ll go to check it and be like, ‘f**king hell, I’m not on that anymore’, and thank god I’m not. It’s terrifying, social media, it terrifies me."

Marsay will be appearing in Season 3 of Netflix’s Black Mirror, which comes out on October 21. Don’t expect her to tweet about it, though.

As long as we’re talking about actors who played villains, let’s check in with Iwan Rheon (Ramsay Bolton). He’s narrated a short film about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in an attempt to raise awareness. Check it out:

Okay, this might make me a horrible person, but even though Rheon is doing something laudable with this short film, hearing his voice still makes me involuntarily nervous. I’m sure that’ll go away in a couple decades.

Rheon has personal experience with the things he’s talking about, as he revealed to Wales Online. He lost his grandmother, Beryl, to Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia in 2008. “She was an incredibly strong woman and wouldn’t take any rubbish from anyone, so to see her go from that to like a scared child was really tough,” he said.

"At times she would become really confused, thinking I was her husband. At first it was kind of funny – you have to try and laugh through these things – but she eventually deteriorated to the point she didn’t know who we were or where she was."

You can find out more about these issues at Alzheimer’s Research UK.

And now for another, much more light-hearted video. I give you: Jonathan Pryce (the High Sparrow) reading vacuous tweets from celebrities, including Kanye West and Harry Styles.

This is the first clip from Audible’s Voices Of Interest series, which will roll out video snippets and audio samplings celebrating the power of the voice. If they’re all this funny, we’re on board.

Finally, Deadline has some news about Alex Graves, the director behind some of Game of Thrones’ most iconic episodes, including And Now His Watch Is Ended, The Lion and the Rose, The Mountain and the Viper, and The Children. He’ll direct a Mulan, based on the Chinese legend of a young girl who took her ailing father’s place in the Chinese Imperial Army, most famously brought to the screen by Disney in a 1998 animated movie.

Note that Disney is also making a live-action version of Mulan. Sony’s adaptation is completely different, because god forbid we not have two movie versions of the same story coming out close in time to one another. Seriously, why does that always seem to happen?

But congratulations to Graves on landing the gig. If you want to direct one more episode of Game of Thrones before the show bows out, I’m sure Benioff and Weiss are listening.

h/t Digital Spy, Mirror