Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei) on Season 5, Grey Worm, and being mixed-race in Hollywood

And the pre-season premiere interview barrage continues. This time, The Daily Beast sat down with Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Missandei the former slave, to talk about the new season of Game of Thrones, among other things.

Since being drafted into the service of Daenerys Targaryen back in Season 3, Missandei’s role has grown to the point where, in this coming year, she’ll be part of the main cast. Predictably, Emmanuel is pretty pleased about this. “Her role is expanding as adviser to Daenerys, and since she’s lost Ser Jorah, Missandei has become a much more important person to Dany as she’s figuring out how to be Queen of Meereen,” she said. “She is now a free person with a voice.”

Last year, showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss set up a romance between Missandei and Grey Worm, the commander of Daenerys’ Unsullied guard. This relationship faces quite a few challenges, not least of all because Grey Worm is a eunuch, but Emmanuel said that it will expand in the coming season.

“They definitely have an attraction, and it’s a very confusing one for the pair of them because they would have never even contemplated having feelings like these for another person in their previous lives, and now they’re free to do that. As people coming out of slavery and the hard lives that they’ve had, to have this beacon of tenderness and sweetness with another character is amazing”

The Missandei-Grey Worm subplot is not present in A Dance with Dragons, the book from which much of the Daenerys material will be drawn this season, but it adds a personal dimension to Daenerys’ slavery crusade that could help it land with viewers, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the producers handle it.

Emmanuel also weighed in on the challenges of being a mixed-race actress in Hollywood (Emmanuel’s mother was Dominican and her father was half-Saint Lucian and half-English), something she was pleasantly surprised to find hasn’t really held her back. “In the past, most of the time a person of color was cast in something it was for a specific reason, but I’m now seeing more roles where they may have written the part for a blond, blue-eyed woman, but they’re actually seeing all different ethnicities,” Emmanuel said. “I’m of mixed heritage and have an ambiguous look about me, and I’ve been going up for roles that are completely different cultures to mine, which is really, really cool.”

Indeed, Emmanuel seems poised to join fellow cast members like Emilia Clarke and Kit Harington as they break into movie stardom. She’s secured a supporting role in the upcoming sequel to young adult fiction adaptation The Maze Runner (it never hurts for a rising star to get a YA adaptation under her belt), and will be playing a hacker in Furious 7, the latest entry in the endlessly successful Fast and the Furious franchise. I swear, at the rate actors from this show are getting movie work, we’re going to turn around in 10 years and realize that half of the stars in Hollywood got their start on Game of Thrones.

• Published on 03/30/2015 at 4:22 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:05 PM CDT