Game of Thrones’ Melisandre actress has launched a scathing attack on the show’s fans as “extremely scary and ungrateful” after receiving death threats about the finale.
The HBO series ended in May 2019 and it certainly divided opinion, but the woman behind the character, Carice van Houten, believes the criticism is a sign of “how good the show was,” reports The Sun.
The 43-year-old told Insider that it didn’t deserve a petition to have it remade and loved the randomness and clumsiness of the show’s final instalment.
She said: “The fact that some people were so disappointed is because everything before that was so good.
“So it feels a bit ungrateful. You’ve had such great times and then yeah, you’re going to be disappointed because it’s not going to go exactly how you anticipated.
“Of course, you’re going to have all sorts of criticisms and I just thought it was a sign of how good the show was.”
Van Houten, who played Melisandre for seven seasons from 2012, felt that fans were perhaps too invested in the show and doesn’t take any threats seriously.
“People sometimes take it too far and get too personal, but I can’t take that seriously. I just thought it’s people being really emotional about this show.
“It just always amazes me how people can go behind their computer and just type, ‘die b*tch die’. I’m fascinated by that human psyche.”
She leapt to the defence of the show’s writers. “That’s beyond fandom. That’s extremism. That’s scary, knowing the writers and knowing how f***ing great they are, they don’t deserve that.”
In the aftermath of Game of Thrones’ controversial conclusion last year, fans were at it again last month as they took to Reddit to air their grievances with the way Sansa and Daenerys were pitted against each other on the series, which is available to stream on Foxtel Now.
User Godless3 kicked off the debate, writing: “Why did Sansa dislike Daenerys? It is never explained or otherwise implied through action or dialogue, and since she was the character that most directly led to Daenerys’ betrayal and spiral into madness, this question should have been answered by the writers.”
They went on to pick holes in the dialogue between the two female leads and suggest that the forbidden love between Jon and Daenerys may not have been the only incest on the table.
This article originally appeared in The Sun and was reproduced with permission
