This Deleted Game of Thrones Scene Would Have Explained a Lot About Cersei
This post contains spoilers for the final season of Game of Thrones. Consider yourself warned.
Game of Thrones has been over for a month—we’re doing Big Little Lies on Sundays now—but will it ever truly be over? That’s probably a no, and not just because a prequel is in the works. A show like Thrones lends itself to endless speculation, especially considering how unhappy many fans were with how showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss opted to close out the eighth and final season.
New details are still emerging about what could have been for some of our favorite inhabitants of Westeros. According to People, actress Lena Headey recently told the crowd at a German comic book convention about a deleted scene that showed her character, Cersei Lannister, having a miscarriage. “We shot a scene that never made it into season seven, which was where I lose the baby,” she said. “And it was a really traumatic, great moment for Cersei, and it never made it in.”
“I kind of loved doing that because I thought it would’ve served her differently,” she continued. “Of course, we’re not exactly sure what made the show’s creators scrap the scene, but we can’t say it isn’t interesting to at least think about how that moment may have changed things.”
You’ll remember that Cersei told her brother Jaime that she was carrying their child and had also convinced Euron Greyjoy that she was pregnant with his baby. Her other brother, Tyrion, tried to use the unborn baby as a motivation for Cersei to negotiate with him and Daenerys, to no avail. Fans were left to wonder what was really going on with Cersei. Was she ever really pregnant? Why wasn’t she showing more if time was passing?
Now we know that, at some point, the show’s creators had planned to offer an explanation. Also, we agree with Headey that we would have loved to see this sort of pivotal scene from Cersei, who was often underused in season eight. Headey recently told The Guardian that she has a “few of her own gripes” about the way Game of Thrones ended, in general, and that she wanted a better death for Cersei. “I will say I wanted a better death,” she said. “Obviously you dream of your death. You could go in any way on that show. So I was kind of gutted. But I just think they couldn’t have pleased everyone. No matter what they did, I think there was going to be some big comedown from the climb.”