Gwendoline Christie Was 'Really Struggling' Before She Was Cast on "Game of Thrones": 'I've Never Been a Conventional Choice' Victoria EdelOctober 17, 2025 at 9:00 PM 0 Claudio Lavenia/Getty; Helen Sloan/HBO Gwendoline Christie on Oct.
- - Gwendoline Christie Was 'Really Struggling' Before She Was Cast on "Game of Thrones": 'I've Never Been a Conventional Choice'
Victoria EdelOctober 17, 2025 at 9:00 PM
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Claudio Lavenia/Getty; Helen Sloan/HBO
Gwendoline Christie on Oct. 4 (left); Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth in 'Game of Thrones' (right) -
Gwendoline Christie opened up about her mindset before she was cast as Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones
The actress, who is six feet, three inches tall, said she was "really struggling" and had been told she would never find a part that spoke to her because of her height
Christie said that Brienne's story was not unlike her own, but she hopes to "transcend" ideas about her height
Gwendoline Christie fought hard for her acting success.
Christie, 46, opened up in the new episode of Bullseye with Jesse Thorn about her career and how getting cast as Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones helped her when she was "really struggling" as an actress.
"That part was a kind of revelation," Christie said about being cast as Brienne. She joined Game of Thrones in season two, which premiered in 2012. "It was a different stage of my life, you know, and the world was in such a different place."
She continued, "At drama school, they told all of us, if you're very, very lucky, one day you may find a part that speaks to you. And in it speaking to you, in a sense, it does the work for you. I didn't think I'd ever quite find that."
Christie said she didn't have that belief because, in part, "I was really struggling with myself if I'm honest." She explained, "Society still does sometimes, but on the whole then, find me difficult to digest. I've never been a conventional choice. But that part was like a bolt from the blue."
Helen Sloane/HBO
Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth in 'Game of Thrones'
She got called in to audition because the casting director had seen her perform at the Royal Shakespeare Company, her first-ever job. He told her agent, "If she takes it seriously, I think that she could be really right for this."
But she said "nobody" thought she'd really book it. "I'd just been told consistently, 'You'll never work on screen because you're too tall and you're too unconventional looking and you're too large overall and you're too much taller than most men,' " she said. Christie is six feet, three inches tall.
But she thought that attitude was "limited" and didn't "reflect the human experience" she had in real life. "Thank goodness I always had a strong sense somehow from nowhere, alongside the crippling lack of self-confidence, a real resilience, like an extraordinary resilience," she said of her determination to forge a career as an actress. She thought her experience working in fashion and with artists helped.
Thorn said what he liked about Brienne is that she is a "really rich" character. "She is a human character in a way that a woman who's as big as the dudes who swings a sword around would not be on any other television program," he said.
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Gwendoline Christie on Oct. 3
"No," Christie said with a laugh. "No, and not at that time either." She said George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire book series provided the "history" and "detail" she needed.
"Also, I'd never seen on screen an experience like mine," she said. Still, she added, "I do hope at some point I'll transcend, 'The tall woman that's managed to be an actor. Isn't it so great that she's managed to overcome this terrible tragedy and just be a human being?' But that's the world. It was Brienne's story book."
Playing the part, she said, changed her life. "It also forced me to confront all the things about myself that I was really terrified about and I wanted to ignore." That included her height, her size and, she joked, her "superhuman strength."
Still, she said training for the series was "a slog."
"Not only would I have to examine and bring my own androgyny, the inconsistencies in my face and appearance, the unconventional nature of myself, I'd had to work really hard working out," she said.
Christie stayed with the series until its eighth and final season, which aired in 2019. She also received her first Emmy nomination for her work in that last season. This year, she was Emmy nominated once again for her guest role on Severance. Since 2022, she's also appeared on Netflix's Wednesday as Larissa Weems. Other roles have included Captain Phasma in the Star Wars sequel series and Lucifer in Netflix's The Sandman.
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