Natalie Dormer: “Female empowerment shouldn’t be about sexuality”
By Ani Bundel
With The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 at the top of the box office this past weekend, star Natalie Dormer, who plays badass propaganda director Cressida, sat down with The Guardian to do an interview about the movie. But, as is the way with many of these interviews, very little was discussed about The Hunger Games, as the franchise has come to an end (at least for now). Instead, as The Guardian noted, it was impossible to avoid “the Hodor sized elephant in the room.”
One of the major issues Dormer faced this past season were the scenes where she is shown sleeping with her barely-in-his-teens husband Tommen Baratheon. The comments this plot point generated were, to say the least, polarizing. Dormer, for one, is frustrated by it.
“The first point is that the male actors in the show don’t get a lot of flak when they’re raping and murdering, because people understand it’s fantasy, and yet if a female actress has to portray something – which isn’t portrayed explicitly – I get flak, personally.
And the second? “That everyone in Game Of Thrones, from Emilia Clarke to Sean Bean, is aged up. When I did those scenes I never imagined I was portraying someone going to bed with an underage child…. Frequently the age gap between a male actor and his female love interest in movies is 15 years-plus. Frequently,” she emphasises. “And the same comments are not made.”
Dormer is not wrong about any of this. But when you take her second point, the “aging up” of the characters is precisely what worked against her here. In the books, Tommen is a seven-year-old monarch, and Margaery’s manipulation of him involves presents of toys and cats, and generally spoiling the heck out of her betrothed. (Because of his age, they are not married in the books.) By aging Tommen up to the point of 14/15 (the actor Dean-Charles Chapman is the legal age of 18) so that their characters could marry and have sex certainly changed the dynamic of Margaery’s arrest, but it also forced the breaking of the age taboo, and put Dormer in the position to be personally attacked by fans.
Dormer admits this would be a lot harder on her if she were in her 20s, like co-star Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games, who regularly is attacked for speaking her mind. But part of the joy they both find in filming that series is that, unlike many TV shows and films in the fantasy genre, their empowerment comes from their actions on the battlefield and in society, and not from dressing provocatively.
“Female empowerment shouldn’t be exclusively about sexuality. And you meet a lot – and I’m going to be careful what I say here – you meet a fair fraction of male writers and directors who want to wave the equality flag and believe that they’re making you a kick-ass female assassin, and they’re empowering you. Whereas true empowerment would be…” she breaks off with a laugh. “You know, not a stylised, hyper sexualisation.”
One of the reasons Margaery is such a kick ass character is that she is powerful from both angles. She uses her sex to get what she wants from Tommen, and Joffrey before him. But her power comes as much from her ability to play the game as it does a low-cut dress. And though she says she found it liberating to give up the silk skirts and corsets to run around in combat boots for The Hunger Games, after nine months she was ready to sit back down in the silk skirts. But not the corset.
“[A]ctually Margaery’s isn’t a corset, it’s a weird infrastructure that puts my breasts up under my chin.”
Well, no one said Westerosi fashions were meant to be comfortable.