Carice van Houten and director Jeremy Podeswa on *That* Premiere Ending

We were promised a “big twist” ending to the premiere episode of Game of Thrones this week, with Melisandre at the center. Carice Van Houten warned us a couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t have anything to do with Jon Snow. But even so, I don’t think many people expected what we got.

CAUTION: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS

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To summarize, at the end of “The Red Woman,” Melisandre, alone in a room at Castle Black, disrobed and rook off her ruby-studded choker. She was revealed to be an ancient woman, 200 years old if she was a day.

This is one of those places where the book-readers probably had a slight leg up on the show-watchers, but only because we are subjected to Martin’s emphasis in his prose. Though this is a reveal that hasn’t come on the page, that Melisandre’s necklace is somehow tied to her is obvious in the books—it’s always glowing red and flashing at her throat. And as for her age, there have been hints here and there that she’s lived a long time. As the ASOIAF wiki notes, she says at one point “she has practiced her art for years beyond count,” and the show dropped a hint that she was older than she looked in Season 2, when she told Stannis that she had been fighting “far longer than you.” Though the show has not ever established her age, Van Houten’s costar said in an early interview that her character was 400 years old.

Van Houten admits that this twist has her more excited for the character than she’s been since she started the show. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, she said that she thought most people, even if they’d read the books, would be startled by the reveal.

I was really happy when I read that we were going to reveal that this year. I don’t think a lot of people will see that coming. It makes her immediately more vulnerable, but also more wise and even more mysterious. There’s also a vulnerability in her age.

To her, this also gives context to being so ambivalent about burning Shireen alive. After all, what is a a child of barely 14 to a woman who has lives centuries? A dust mote. “That’s why she was able to say, ‘This is just a small war, it’s all relative compared to the big war we’re going to face. [Her age] makes everything even more meta. Definitely, that’s where all that stuff comes from.”

One very interesting thing to note is that Van Houten says that Melisandre actually doesn’t know quite how her magic works, only that it does. It’s one of the things she has taken on faith all these years, much like how she took the idea that Stannis was Azor Ahai reborn on faith. One wonders, now that her faith has been shaken, if her belief in her own powers will be shaken, too. After all, it’s not just Stannis she was wrong about. As her character noted upon seeing Jon Snow dead, she has seen him in the flames fighting at Winterfell. That’s not possible now, either…is it?

Of course, by now you may also have heard fans complaining about the fact that we already saw Melisandre sans necklace, in the bath with Seylse attending to her in Season 4, and she looked fine.

Continuity error? Or is Seylse’s faith so strong that Melisandre didn’t need her glamour magic in front of Stannis’ wife? Or is removing the necklace not the only thing required to dissipate the illusion? We’ll let you choose what your faith leads you to believe.

Anyway, how did the production team achieve this effect? Director Jeremy Podeswa also talked to Entertainment Weekly, where he revealed that they did something similar to what was done with Lena Headey (Cersei) during her walk of shame last season. Carice van Houten wore prosthetic makeup and fake hair to make her look ancient, but her body was played by an older woman.

Podeswa also said that while Melisandre is obviously older than she lets on, they didn’t want to reveal exactly how old she was.

"The idea is there’s an indefinite indeterminate quality that she could be ancient. We were limited by choosing to use a real person rather than a complete CG creation. Because what does a 400-year-old person look like? We don’t know. So if you try to create that, then you’re creating something that looks beyond our known reality. Here you feel like she’s very old without putting a number on it."

He continued:

"I think the performance of both actresses helps making her look ageless. There was a question of whether we should add more effects to make [the body double] look older, but I think anything we could have done would have made them look less real. When doing a fantasy show – or a show with fantasy elements – the more you can anchor an effect to reality the stronger the illusion is."

And of course, Melisandre’s resemblance to a character from The Princess Bride hasn’t gone unnoticed.