Gwendoline Christie fondly remembers Brienne of Tarth, who "fed me for all of those years"

Gwendoline Christie found mainstream fame playing Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones, and she remains very attached to her iconic character. "I had a wonderful character to play that I loved so much and was so rich and there was so much to explore," she recently told Radio Times. "I love the writing. I love the character as created by George RR Martin. I love the adaptation by [showrunners] David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss]. I thought that was really brilliant."

Christie's sincerity always shone through the screen on Game of Thrones, and was one of the things that made watching her journey as Brienne so compelling. I'm not surprised to hear that she didn't really pay attention to the enormous popularity of the show while it was on, since she was too busy being "very, very invested in my character."

"The character fed me for all of those years. The character never once stopped feeding me, and I never stopped working on the character right to the very end, even with things that people were surprised by, like when Brienne smiled when she was knighted. That made complete sense to me that she hadn’t really smiled. This is the time she smiled, because she got the thing she wanted in a very intimate and special way."

The scene where Jaime Lannister knights Brienne is one of her best scenes, and is probably the best scene of the whole final season. Brienne doesn't just give her smiles away; when she smiles, you know she means it.

Gwendoline Christie has "every confidence" that George R.R. Martin will finish The Winds of Winter

There's a purity to Brienne you sense in Christie as well. She even throws in some words of support for author George R.R. Martin, who's been writing the sixth book in his Song of Ice and Fire series, The Winds of Winter, for well over a decade at this point. "I have every confidence that he will [finish it], Christie said. "I hope so. I have great love for George, and he’s been very good to me over the years. He’s wonderful."

The jury is still out on Winds, but Christie has been killing it in a number of high-profile roles since the end of Game of Thrones, including spots in shows like Wednesday and The Sandman, not to mention playing Captain Phasma in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. She's about to appear in a new movie called Robin and the Hoods, about a group of kids who are trying to stop a developer from tearing down their forest getaway. Watch for her appearance as "the witch" (or a woman who lives in the forest whom the imaginative kids perceive as a witch) around the one-minute mark in the trailer below:

Robin and the Hoods isn't exactly another medieval epic, but it's close enough that I can see why they thought Christie might be a good fit. After all, she's done this kind of thing before, better than almost anybody else in the game.

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