Carice Van Houten (Melisandre) was “crying like a baby” after her final Game of Thrones scene

After seven seasons of playing the Red Witch Melisandre, Carice Van Houten finally scored her first Emmy nomination for her performance in “The Long Night,” in the category of Outstanding Guest Actress In A Drama Series. Obviously, we’re pulling for her, for her work in that episode and for her performance in general.

One of the most interesting things about Melisandre was her moral ambiguity — sure, she resurrected Jon Snow, but she also burned a little girl alive. How do you reconcile that? Is she good or evil?

Speaking to Gold Derby, Van Houten said that the showrunners were rarely forthcoming about the details of Mel’s story. “I’ve tried so many times coming from all sorts of angles to try to get something out of them but they just didn’t wanna,” she said. “The more seasons we got into the less they said, it felt like. So I just at some point gave up. I was just like, ‘I’ll see it on TV.’ (Laughs.)” This meant that, at times, she was as intrigued by Melisandre’s motives as the viewers, but in the end, she thinks she knows where the Red Woman stands:

"[I]t was never about her own personal gain, I think, because in the end, you see that she’s the most important thing, is telling Arya to kill the Night King, to save all of us. It was never about her and I think she was always aware of the fact that it was not her having magical powers. She actually says it at some point to Stannis, ‘It’s not me, I’m just a vessel. I’m nothing special, really. It’s the Lord of Light. That’s who I work with.’"

Indeed, after Melisandre played her part, she walked willingly into oblivion, her role fulfilled. “I really knew I had it coming just because of my scene with Varys in the season before,” Van Houten said of Melisandre’s death. “I didn’t know how. I remember reading it and I just really had goosebumps. I just really thought they did it so elegantly. It was exactly how I pictured it and even more emotional, in fact. Even when I watched it I got emotional, not my own acting, but the placement of the scene and the whole episode.”

Melisandre’s quiet, understated death scene might be my favorite from the season. It probably ranks pretty high in the series as a whole:

That was the last we saw of Melisandre, but Van Houten’s final scene was her lighting the trenches on fire, another good one:

“It was a very intense scene to do and it was mixed with my own emotions of it being my last scene and saying goodbye has never been my favorite thing in the world,” Van Houten said. “It was quite a loaded day, you could say. A lot of tension had to come out after I’d done that scene and I just started crying like a baby. I didn’t really see that coming. I just was overwhelmed by emotion. I just couldn’t stop crying.”

But it was all worth it when she saw the final episode onscreen:

"It was amazing. You read it on paper and you can imagine that they have the skills to make it work in the budget but then to actually see it coming alive, I just loved it. The fact that the episode before was so quiet and preparing and there was more intellectual episode and then the third one was just so physical and it was really at some point the pedal had to come. Sometimes all you have to do is fight. There’s no time for talk. You just have to survive. I just thought that was really powerful in that episode and then to be the last piano notes in the symphony, it was amazing."

The Emmys go down on Fox on Sunday, September 22. We’ll be rooting for Van Houten!

Of course, there’s more to Game of Thrones than just “The Long Night.” Van Houten also talked about how she enjoyed the “unexpected” ending with Bran Stark as king, and how fans have approached her over the years:

"I’ve had death threats towards my character, I’ve had marriage proposals, I’ve had people screaming at me, crying in the streets. Weird (laughs). But I think the thing that’s so amazing about this show in this time where we’re all disconnected I feel sometimes and we’re all so digital, the fact that there’s something that has connected so many different people all over the world, that’s my favorite thing about it all. It’s pretty amazing, I think."

As for what she’ll miss most about the series, Van Houten pegs time spent with costar Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth). “He teased me to death,” she remembers. “He’s such a goofball. Being around my co-actors and being in the makeup truck, all that stuff. It really felt like a bit of a family over the last seven years. It is a bit sad. The hair, I’ll miss the hair. I miss that wig.”

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