Carice Van Houten and Liam Cunningham defend Game of Thrones nudity and tease Season 4

Carice Van Houten and Liam Cunningham recently attended a press event in London to promote Season 4 of Game of Thrones. The pair answered questions about the amount of nudity on the show, and also teased their characters storylines for the upcoming season.

Carice Van Houten is no stranger to nudity on Thrones, her character Melisandre has birthed a shadow assassin and had her fair share of sex scenes. So it’s no surpise that she defends showing the body’s natural state on screen: “We can see machine guns but we can’t see f**king – sorry – people? I really don’t get, I have to make a point here. Who sleeps with their bra on? I mean, sorry if that’s a Dutch approach but I think we need to get used to it. It’s part of life.”

When asked if there should be more male nudity on the show, she added: “Hell yeah! Of course it has to be functional and it mostly is. But in general that’s what I like about the show, not the sex per se but the nudity is part of life.”

Although he hasn’t had to bare all for the show as Davos Seaworth, Liam Cunningham agrees that nudity has it’s place on Thrones and is not demeaning to its female characters: “If there wasn’t a hugely strong female character in this, like [Melisandre], then it would be sexist. It’s just gratuitous. But some of the most dangerous characters in the show are women – there’s Cersei. They are extraordinarily well-drawn.”

Cersei may be dangerous, but it’s Melisandre that keeps Davos on his toes. Of their on-screen relationship he says: “It’s inclusive and it’s not just the strong man and the women as the stay-at-home wife or she’s there to be the hostage. She’s not functional. She’s f**king dangerous in this show and has to be watched.”

Nudity may have been the hot topic of the day, but the pair also gave a tease of what we can expect from Season 4.

Carice admits that we won’t be seeing as much of Melisandre this year, but that doesn’t mean what we will see won’t be good: “Stannis has a light season this year but we have a few meaty scenes. […] Our storyline is going to move somewhere else and it’s going to be interesting because it’s going to collide with a world which we also know, and what’s going to happen there.”

And Liam reiterates what we have already learned about the flow of Season 4 as a whole: “One of the differences this year from reading the scripts is that, generally speaking, over the three seasons there’s been a slow and gradual build up with magnificent stories up to the big episodes which is usually episode 9. It’s not like that in this season. It’s kicking off very early on, it’s really dramatic and as opposed to the one big climax of the other season, there’s going to be several. It’s bigger, bolder, brassier – and I’m dying to see it as well”.

For the full article and more quotes from Carice and Liam visit The Independent!

• Published on 02/12/2014 at 7:20 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 12:43 PM CDT