Lena Headey

Watch what Lena Headey does when someone else is talking. She does not react much. The jaw sets, the eyes stay on the speaker a beat too long, and by the time she answers we already know what she thinks of them. In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008) that stillness is the performance: Sarah Connor is harsh with everyone, including her son, and Headey makes the harshness understandable without once making her easy company.

She was spotted at seventeen in a school production and went straight to work, with Waterland (1992) and Lizzie in The Remains of the Day (1993), and then more than a decade of steady British film and television before anyone abroad took much notice. 300 (2007) changed that, with Gorgo, Queen of Sparta, the first of her queens and the first of two films with Zack Snyder. Sarah Connor followed, and then the part she will be remembered for, Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones (2011–2019), eight seasons of a woman who is nearly always the most dangerous person at the table and rarely raises her voice. Dredd (2012), where she played the villain Ma-Ma, fits the same pattern from the other side of the law.

The pattern is the thing. She is cast, over and over, as a strong and often ruthless woman with power or a child to protect, and she plays these parts without theatrics and without vanity: she will look tired, or plain, or afraid, if that is what the scene needs. Her own line on Cersei was "I don’t know if I sympathize with her. I admire her," and that is roughly how she plays all of them, from the inside, with the reasons intact. It is why the Sarah Connor of the Chronicles moved us more than an action series had any right to. Keeping John safe gives this mother no peace at all, and Headey lets the worry sit on her face through scenes where the script has her doing something else entirely. Thomas Dekker gives her enough back as John that the mother and son are worth following on their own, and the programme is at its best when it lets them.

The cost of being that good at one thing is that people stop asking for anything else. The parts since Game of Thrones, White House Plumbers (2023) and Beacon 23 among them, have been smaller and quieter, and there is a fair question about whether anyone has yet written her a woman who is neither a queen nor a soldier. We suspect she would be good at it. Nobody seems in a hurry to find out.