Curtain Call: Elizabeth Webster (And Uncredited Baby)

“I have become oddly fond of my fat little wife.” —Roose Bolton, on the subject of Fat Walda, A Dance with Dragons

It is a rare moment to have sympathy for a Frey here in Westeros. The Freys, after all, are synonymous with the breaking of guest right, not to mention cruelty and opportunism. But this week, the show made us feel sympathy for Fat Walda Frey. She did not deserve to die onscreen.

In the grand scheme of things, Fat Walda is a very minor character. One of a huge number of children fathered by Frey patriarch Walder Frey (he seems to name half his sons Walder and half his daughters Walda), she is the butt of many jokes in the books. Most of those did not cross over into the show, but one did: the reason Roose married her in the first place. To secure the loyalty of House Bolton, Frey offered Roose one of his daughters and “her weight in silver as a dowry.” Roose, being the sort of man he is, therefore chose the fattest daughter available.

But Elizabeth Webster did a decent job with this tiny role. She used her bulk to her advantage, and made sure to to play her character up as bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and, most importantly, young. Webster had only been acting for a few years when she was cast on Game of Thrones—she did guest stints on Call the Midwife and The Spa, and starred in British comedy Cockneys vs Zombies. To date, Walda Frey is her more prominent role.

Part of why Webster’s portrayal worked is that she played up the innocent, fish-out-of-water aspect of the character. Look at the header image, of Walda standing alongside Ramsay and Roose. She looks like she’s both a part of the family and totally from another world. Ramsay is a monster and his father knows it. His wife? Not so much. She does, however, know her role in life is to be a broodmare, and she has no idea she is writing her own death warrant when she boasts to Sansa and Ramsay of being with child.

In the books, it’s suggested that Fat Walda is smarter than she appears and that her jokes are rather witty. Sadly, little of this translated to the screen. Sadly, when people think back on the character, they will probably remember Webster’s work from this past Sunday.

Last year, when Ramsay raped Sansa on their wedding night, some complained that it was wrong for the camera to cut away to Theon’s face. But to me, it seemed to be part of a trend. In Season 3, the show established what a horrific person Ramsay Bolton was by showing onscreen what had been left off the page: his systematic torture of Theon Greyjoy. After that, it seemed we no longer had to see the worst of his behavior. We might see him emotionally tear Sansa down on the walls of Winterfell, but his nightly rapes of her are kept offscreen, and the physical violence she might be enduring is left to our imaginations.  I thought the show had turned the corner.

So it was a horrendous disappointment this week when Game of Thrones depicted Walda’s horrible death in detail, especially in light of the fact that the end of the show is approaching faster than we thought. With so few episodes left, the show wants to spend its time watching someone who’s smarter on the page airily follow her husband’s psychopathic, power-hungry son into a dog kennel carrying her newborn son (the birth of whom doomed both herself and Roose) like a damn fool?

It was a reminder of why many people think this show fails to respect women, and why they accuse it of getting off on unnecessary violence. Perhaps the producers decided that those minutes we could have spent seeing Peter Dinklage interact with dragons or examining Arya’s training were better spent proving that they don’t care what people think. But as far as I can tell, all it did was make us sympathize with a Frey, and gave us more information on how Fat Walda perished than I ever needed to know.