In other topics, van Houten confirmed that she did not submit herself for consideration at the 2019 Emmys, as did a couple of her Game of Thrones castmates. For example, I don’t think the show needed Melisandre to be naked during her conversation with Selyse at Dragonstone - the nudity in that scene was there just because - but I think her stripping down to look at her unvarnished self in the mirror in the season 6 premiere was an important character moment, her coming face to face with herself during a low point in her life. As it went on, that stopped, and the few nude scenes we got were more likely to make sense in the context of the narrative. In its early years, it definitely featured a lot of nudity for no other reason than just to have it, something the executives at HBO very much encouraged and maybe even required.
Game of Thrones had an interesting relationship with nudity. No more.”Īccording to van Houten, this change of thought is “me confronting my own feeling of ‘that’s what the audience wants’ and not feeling confident to say, ‘Wait a minute, why would I have to do that?’ It’s just our conditioned behaviour as females, and not thinking about what that means. But she’s now only in favor of it when it’s necessary for the narrative. “I was always very liberal and I defended nudity because I thought, ‘Why can you have a machine gun and not see a nipple?’ I thought it was so weird,” she said. That said, van Houten is still in favor of nudity when it’s appropriate.
So the movie is sexual, but sexual doesn’t necessarily require nudity. Instinct follows a psychologist who becomes infatuated with one of her patients, a sex offender in a penal institute. We don’t need to show nudity to create intimacy, we don’t need to see breasts.” Carice van Houten on nude scenes, what she should’ve taken from the Game of Thrones set. “We sort of made it into a dogma where we are done with that. “I became very aware of the male gaze, and that’s also why, during that process, me and my friend Halina Reijn made Instinct, very much inspired by that,” she said. Thinking about these sorts of issues is part of what inspired van Houten to form the production company Man Up with director Halina Reijn, which focuses on movies told from a female perspective. In retrospect, I thought, ‘Why did that scene have to be nude? Why was that normal?’ I did question things and it was not so much that I was blaming anyone, but that’s just how we evolved, and just how the movement affected me.” “And it did sort of change my perspective on my whole career, not just Game of Thrones.
“When the Me Too movement started, that’s when it started sinking in for me,” van Houten told Insider. Looking back in light of what’s happened in Hollywood over the last few years, her feelings on that part of her career have evolved. Melisandre is also one of several characters to act in nude scenes over the years, whether she was having sex with Stannis Baratheon in season 2, talking with Selyse while taking a bath in season 3, or revealing her true self in season 6.