Last week, we debated who deserved the title of Best Supporting Actress for Game of Thrones season 7. This week, we’re moving on to the heavy hitters. Who was the Best Actress of the year?
DAN: By this point, all the actresses on this list have been playing their characters for over half a decade, and they’ve gotten very, very good at it. I could write about any of them, but I’d like to give a respectful nod to Emilia Clarke, who’s successfully turned Daenerys Targaryen into an icon and who doesn’t always get the credit I feel she deserves.
Alongside Jon Snow, Daenerys is one of the closest things Game of Thrones has to a traditional good guy. (Although granted, that may not mean much given the show’s rampant moral relativism.) And like Jon Snow, there’s a certain flatness to her character — again, relatively speaking. It falls to Clarke to show us what’s going on inside Daenerys. Over the past seven years, she’s honed and expanded a set of tools designed to do just that.
One of those tools is the speech, of which Clarke is assigned many. Here’s one Daenerys delivers to Jon in “The Queen’s Justice”:
"I was born at Dragonstone. Not that I can remember it. We fled before Robert’s assassin’s could find us…I spent my life in foreign lands. So many men have tried to kill me. I don’t remember all their names. I have been sold like a brood mare. I have been chained and betrayed. Raped and defiled. Do you know what kept me standing through all those years in exile? Faith. Not in any gods, not in myths and legends. In myself. In Daenerys Targaryen. The world hadn’t seen a dragon in centuries until my children were born. The Dothraki hadn’t crossed the sea, any sea. They did for me. I was born to rule the Seven Kingdoms, and I will."
This kind of speech — long and writerly — is not easy to pull off. People don’t actually talk like this, and Clarke has to summon considerable screen presence to sell it. She does. Clarke uses her eyes, her deliberate walk, and the slow cadence of her voice to project power, to dare her audience to interrupt while she’s talking. They don’t, and we don’t, because her effort is successful. This isn’t easy to pull off, but watching Clarke work, it looks like it is.
Moments of anger seem to animate Clarke. She hardly has any dialogue during the Loot Train Attack sequence in “The Spoils of War,” but just looking at her on Drogon, her brow lowered like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, is enough to intimidate us.
The flip side of that are her moments of vulnerability, as when she watches Viserion sink into the icy lake in “Beyond the Wall.” Clarke has a knack for finding the key emotion of a sequence — anger, grief, passion — and heightening it. It’s no wonder the camera love to linger on her face, and why she’s become iconic in the role.
I thought Clarke was tremendous in season 7, and I’m looking forward to what she does with Daenerys’ big finish in season 8.
COREY: Interesting that you picked Ms. Clarke, Dan. I’ve always considered her storyline, and by extension her acting, something we had to suffer through. There are occasional moments of excitement, but those usually involve dragons.
Anyways, I’m going to throw the council into an uproar and choose Sophie Turner.
Sansa’s storyline might have been idiotic throughout most of season 7, but Turner acted the hell out of what she was given. I’d go so far as to say Turner’s acting stood out in most every scene she was in. From her stunned reaction to Jon’s decision to leave her in charge of Winterfell to her confrontation with Arya, Turner’s acting was top notch. In the latter scene, her terror was palpable. Despite the idiocy of making us think Arya might actually murder Sansa, Turner’s horror at the discovery of Arya’s faces was excellent.
Turner’s best season 7 scene was one of her last: the confrontation with Littlefinger. Although I was not a fan of how we arrived there, Turner was cold and calculating fury. We rarely get to see Turner play the upper hand, and it was a pleasant surprise to watch her stretch those acting muscles, so to speak. Her onscreen siblings Maisie Williams and Isaac Hempstead Wright played the scene pretty emotionless, so Turner had to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Between her and Aidan Gillen, we forget how rushed the Winterfell storyline felt. That’s no easy task.
I can only hope Thrones producers give her something just as meaty and less moronic to work with in the show’s final season.
RICHARD: Good selections, Dan and Corey! I’m gonna go with Lena Headey, who really crushed the Dark Queen thing this season. Despite the overwhelming anger and bitterness inside Cersei, Headey has always been able to communicate her character’s internal desperation and fragility. It’s a difficult balancing act, to try to infuse humanity into a character so unlikeable.
But this season, Cersei was set free from any ethical concerns she may have had following the death of her last youngest child, Tommen. And though she has been outmaneuvered in the great game now and again, she had already wiped the slate clean by blowing up the Sept of Baelor, along with all of her enemies, at the end of season 6. She’s intellectually (if not emotionally) severed herself from her twin brother, Jaime, and he was the last moderating voice in her inner circle. Now she is surrounded by the nefarious Maester Qyburn, the mute Mountain and the wild and crazy Euron Greyjoy (with an Ironborn Fleet and the Golden Company at her service). With allies like these, she is more than capable of keeping the Iron Throne.
Every time Headey came on screen, you could feel the hatred and the hunger for power and revenge that drives Cersei, whether she was torturing Ellaria and Tyene Sand, negotiating in the Dragonpit or exiling Jaime from King’s Landing. The Dark Queen spent season 7 transforming into pitiless, black ice, a process Headey took to with relish. That may well be the formula needed to conquer Westeros.
SEBASTIAN: This is a tough one and, sadly, not for the right reasons. In season 7, most of the bigger female roles were lumbered with some of the worst writing on Game of Thrones, period. Sophie Turnerʼs only assignment for season 7 seems to have been to threaten to become an improbable pretender to Jonʼs kingship. Emilia Clarkeʼs Dany fell in love with Jon Snow. Thatʼs fine, as much as a bit of aunt-and-nephew sexy time can be fine, I guess. The real issue for me was that the whole conflict between Dany and Jon seemed forced. I was never quite convinced that either of them would insist on bending the knee or not bending the knee respectively, let alone both of them. It seemed like a cheap and ultimately unsuccessful way (for me, that is) to create tension, not dissimilar to the situation between Sansa and Arya.
Lena Headeyʼs Cersei is a bit of a different matter. Cersei was, of course, a major part of what made the finale of season 6 so great, but that finale left her in a tumultuous situation. I would have loved to see a more-determined-than-ever, more-paranoid-than-ever Cersei try to consolidate her power in the aftermath. We got none of that, though. We lost sight of maybe the most interesting version of Cersei Lannister in all of Game of Thrones in between seasons only to find a less interesting version in her place.
That leaves me with Maisie Williams and Gwendoline Christie. I mean, you could argue that I am meant to judge actorsʼ performances here and not their roles. I get that. But that’s like judging a heavyweight boxer by how they defeated a featherweight, or like judging a painter by their handwriting. Since Maisie Williamsʼ Arya was also involved in the awful confrontation with Sansa most of the time, I have go with Gwendoline Christie on this one. She showed us a confident, badass Brienne and simply got less awfulness to work with.
RAZOR: While I personally feel all the women on the Best Actress list had a phenomenal season 7 (can we get Gwendoline Christie more scenes, please?), I don’t think the show could go on without Lena Headey as Cersei Lannister.
For six seasons, Heady has made me absolutely love to hate Cersei, and that emotion is indicator #1 when trying to separate the chaff from the wheat when it comes to choosing the best actress, in my humble opinion. Having destroyed all her immediate rivals in the season 6 finale, Cersei was free to run (part of) Westeros as she saw fit in season 7, and it was a pleasure to watch Headey masterfully ply her craft.
While Headey had more than one outstanding scene in season 7, I would say her best came in “The Queen’s Justice” when she villainously tortured Ellaria and Tyene Sand in her basement dungeon of horrors. Watching Headey taunt Ellaria with Oberyn’s was a sick treat, but when she delivered the poisonous kiss to Tyene and dramatically wiped the poison lipstick off her lips, the sequence became unforgettable. Just give Headey the award, and let’s all call it a day.
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