The first movie Gwendoline Christie fell in love with: “From the opening titles”
Few actors have made quite as impressive a career out of appearing in enormous TV and movie franchises as British star Gwendoline Christie.
While she may have first come to our attention as ‘Brienne of Tarth’ in the globe-conquering sex and swords behemoth Game of Thrones, she’s also appeared in, deep breath, Star Wars, The Hunger Games, Wednesday, and Severance and has a recurring role in Netflix drama The Sandman.
That’s a lot of viewers and success for the 46-year-old actor from West Sussex who began plying her trade after graduating from a London drama school but was told she would likely not get too many roles due to her unusual height.
She began on-screen work with roles in a few short films and a small part in the Terry Gilliam fantasy The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in 2009 alongside the late Heath Ledger before she was cast in Game of Thrones in 2011.
Christie knew of the fearsome warrior character she was auditioning to play and indeed turned up in full costume, a move that creator George RR Martin said got her the job almost without debate. She then practised horse riding, sword fighting, and stunt work religiously for the role that eventually earned her Screen Actors Guild nominations.
Thanks to her performances, Christie also picked up a role in the fantasy series Wizards vs Aliens from Dr Who writer Russell T Davies. Two years later, she was cast in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part Two, and it was the same year that she landed Star Wars: The Force Awakens as Captain Plasma, which represented something of a dream come true for the actor.
Hugely anticipated, it was the first movie in the rebooted Star Wars trilogy and served as a sequel to the 1983 classic Return of the Jedi. For Christie, who was a huge fan of the franchise, it led to an involvement in George Lucas’s world that lasted several years.
She told Buzzfeed: “I remember seeing (1977’s Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope) when I was about 6 years old and my family presented it to me as, ‘This is Star Wars.’ There was so much excitement and they kept saying, ‘You’re going to love this.’ And I did. I loved it from the opening titles.”
Christie was aware that new Star Wars films were to be made around 2012 and began to instruct her agent to focus on somehow getting her a role in the project.
She added: “I wanted to be in it so badly, I just did not stop going on about it,” she said, her retroactive passion taking over. “My agent would say, ‘There’s this other project that wants you,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, that sounds great, but I want to be in Star Wars.’ And I was told, ‘Good luck. So does everybody.’ Then, eventually, some people were worn down and I got the call.”
Christie went on to reprise her role not just in the second instalment two years later, but also in a read-a-long storybook, a TV series called Star Wars: Resistance and the Battlefront II video game.
In recent years, Christie has shone with a brilliant cameo role in the fantastically twisty Apple TV+ series Severance with Adam Scott and has had rave reviews for her part in the Addams Family spin-off Wednesday, in which she plays Principal Larissa Weems. She will be seen again in the latest part of the second season of the show, which hits Netflix on September 3rd.
