Sophie Turner defends the Stranger Things cast, and other Game of Thrones cast member news

Game of Thrones cast members are filming season 8. Game of Thrones cast members are furthering their own careers. Game of Thrones cast members are everywhere and everything. These are their stories.

First up, a couple of Thrones stars have shiny new gigs. The Hollywood Reporter has it that Carice van Houten (Melisandre) has joined the cast of I Am Not a Bird, based on Catherine Hanrahan’s debut novel Lost Girls and Love Hotels. Van Houten will play Ines, a grown woman living in Tokyo who realizes her days of living it up on the nightclub scene are over, and who is trying to head back home. She’s friends with the main character, a younger woman who’s following the same path she did.

You’ll also be able to see van Houten in person shortly at this year’s Hero Festival in Marseille, France. Calling all Thronies.

And while van Houten is getting a supporting role in that drama, Faye Marsay (the Waif) has landed the lead in Shamed, a UK production commission by Channel 4. She’ll play Sarah Ivy, a 27-year-old woman who decides to get revenge for a horrific act committed against her when she was a teenager. With help from her brother, she kidnaps two men and keeps them in a DIY prison cell.

“Neither of them believes they know Sarah, or what she would want with them, but Sarah knows,” per the official description. What happened to her? What has led her to this? And how will [the men] escape?”

That description kind of makes it sound like Sarah is the villain and the men her unjustly taken prisoners, although I’m sure it’ll be knottier than that. Either way, the Waif would be happy…or as happy as the Waif ever gets.

In more politically active news, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister) wrote an opinion piece for National Geographic about the dangers of climate change with an emphasis on how it’s affecting Greenland and Maldives, the latter of which he visited in his capacity as a United Nations Development Programme Goodwill Ambassador. “Whether you live in the Maldives, Greenland, the U.S. or any other part of the world, climate change is a threat to every single person on this planet,” he writes in his summation. “But an even bigger threat is inaction. Doing nothing will have catastrophic consequences.” Read the whole article here.

And then, after you’ve politically engaged for a while, you can see Coster-Waldau in the flesh a the upcoming Comic Con Experience in São Paulo, Brazil.

Finally, there are a couple of quick bits of Sophie Turner news. First, here’s video of her engagement party to Joe Jonas. Looks like a good time:

But Turner really made waves when she came to the defense of the young cast of Netflix’s Stranger Things, who she saw accosted by over-ardent fans outside their hotels.

Seeing as Turner began her turn on Thrones was she was very young, surely she can relate to this.

Next: A movie theater is marathoning the entirety of Game of Thrones and maybe you should go

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