Nathalie Emmanuel addresses tokenism in fantasy and Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones has a strong cast — enough to get an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Casting this year — but it also a pretty strongly white cast. One of the exceptions is Nathalie Emmanuel, who played Missandei — the slave-turned-right-hand-woman to the Mother of Dragons Missandei — for six seasons. She was the only woman of color in the cast who had any kind of longevity or development, which may have been one of the reasons the reaction to her brutal death in “The Last of the Starks” was so strong.

Speaking to ET Online, Emmanuel said she “expected the reaction” to Missandei’s death, but “wasn’t quite prepared for the size of the reaction.” She took the opportunity to talk about where Missandei’s death fits in the wider conversation of racial representation on TV:

"When you have the token characters — I don’t think they tokenize us in the usual sense — but when you have one or two characters, people who are used to being othered or of a minority background, [viewers] will look for the closest thing to them, and I think so many people are so rooting and invested in those two characters. And then specifically women and women of color [identified with] Missandei […]I was kind of excited that that conversation [about Missandei’s death] was being had. But it’s something we can learn from going forward, about how we cast things, especially because it was a fantasy series. There’s fantasy, there’s so much more possibility. And …that way, if you try to cast as inclusively as possible, when the only one goes or is no longer in the show, there’s not so much of a heartbreak, because you feel represented throughout, as opposed to by just one person."

Indeed, there are only two prominent characters of color left at the end of Game of Thrones: Missandei and Grey Worm (Jacob Anderson), both of whom are slaves when we meet them. Sure, Xaro Xhoan Daxos and others appear here and there, but none of them get the emotional development of Missandei or Grey Worm.

There are a lot of fantasy shows on the horizon. Are any of them taking Emmanuel’s take on representation to heart? Some shows, like Disney’s Star Wars series The Mandalorian, have multiple actors of color, from Pedro Pascal to Carl Weathers to Omid Abtahi. Ditto Blood Moon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel show. Most seem like they are indeed making strides, including His Dark Materials and Watchmen.

(Real quick, speaking of Star Wars, Emmanuel would definitely work with Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss on their upcoming trilogy: “If they want to cast me in Star Wars, I will be totally fine with that,” she said. “They’re really good guys, and very talented writers, and I feel very privileged to have worked with them.”)

That all sounds like it might fulfill some of Emmanuel’s wishes to have people find representation in more than one character, especially in fantasy and science fiction. At the same time, it’s still something that can always be improved. After all, it’s not just about casting people of color, it’s about giving them complex, different roles.

In Emmanuel’s case, she mentions how Missandei’s last word — “Dracarys” — had to come out strongly: “I was very certain that she had to go with strength and with agency and the ferocity of it was really important to me,” because Missandei is normally “very still, very quiet.”

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Hopefully Emmanuel’s words, as a Game of Thrones alumna and now starring in Four Weddings and a Funeral over on Hulu, will resonate with casting agencies around the world.

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