Gwendoline Christie Brings Anti-Brienne of Tarth Energy to Severance

IT CAN BE hard for any actor to follow up on an iconic role. Think of Seinfeld, for example; Julia Louis-Dreyfus has managed to become one of the most acclaimed and awarded actresses of all time, but she’s the exception. Most of the time when someone sees this gentleman show up in another movie or show, they immediately go full Leo Pointing Meme, and think “it’s Newman!” That is not meant as shade toward Wayne Knight (who plays Newman) or any of the other great work he’s done in his career (including in fantastic movies like JFK, Jurassic Park, and Basic Instinct), but moreso just to say that it can be particularly hard for television stalwarts to escape their most iconic characters.

Gwendoline Christie, who deputed in Game of Thrones second season and went on to appear in 42 episodes across the next seven seasons of the show, certainly succeeded in creating an iconic character in the pure-hearted knight Brienne of Tarth; in such a violent show filled with characters who tend to either be purely treacherous or who exist in the gray areas between good and evil, Christie’s Brienne is by far the most noble. And that helps her stand out just as much as her strong performance and impressive action sequences. That Christie is so statuesque—she stands at 6’3”—also worked in two ways; it made her Thrones character all the more striking, unique, and memorable, but also made it difficult for the actress to simply slide into any other roles.

Luckily, Christie is an extraordinarily talented actress who has refused to allow herself to be typecast. She played the sinister Lucifer in Netflix’s The Sandman, and the uptight school headmaster Larissa Weems in the first season of Wednesday; both roles took advantage of her unique skills as a performer while not at all painting her into a Brienne of Tarth box.

Christie gets the opportunity to once again reinvent herself in a decidedly not Brienne of Tarth way with a mysterious role in the second season of Severance. Just from the sheer premise of the show—people who work at Lumon Industries have decided to completely sever their work and persona lives—there’s mystery around every character. But because we’re meeting Christie’s character, an eccentric woman named Lorne, later in the game (in season 2, episode 3, “Who Is Alive”), and because we’ve only seen a little bit of her Innie and obviously know nothing at all of her Outie, she’s inherently odd from the jump.

Add in the fact that she works in the Mammalians Nurturable department, where she and several other unkempt weirdos are seemingly overseeing a pasture filled with goats, and, well, it’s a great opportunity for Christie to craft what just might be her strangest and most unique character yet. I’ve compared Severance in the past to both Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine, and while those two certainly capture the strange minimalism and light sci-fi that Severance possesses, there’s something even more absurd and mysterious that comes with the introduction of Christie’s character, Lorne.

She’ll certainly figure into the rest of the story, as everything happening at Lumon comes more and more under the microscope. And if we ever find out what the hell is going on with those goats, it’s a pretty good bet that Lorne is going to be a major part of solving it all.

Gwendoline Christie plays Lorne in Severance season 2

You know Christie best for her role as Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones, where she entered early in that show’s second season and never left; her strength, stature, and pureness of heart made her one of the strongest and most beloved characters in the show. She also had uniquely fantastic chemistry with a number of different actors in the show, most notably Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Jamie Lannister; the show bungled their ending, but this is a scenario where we can make a strong case for the journey being more important than the destination.

Christie became one of the most popular actors to come out of Thrones following her role on the show; in addition to consistently working in major film and television projects, she’s also accrued a following of more than 3 million on Instagram. She’s very active on her profile, having recently posted a tribute to legendary filmmaker David Lynch following his death, and clearly showing her excitement for being in Severance season 2.

In addition to her roles on Game of Thrones, Severance, The Sandman, and Wednesday, Christie also played a key antagonist in the Star Wars prequel films named Captain Phasma; Phasma was effectively the nemesis of John Boyega‘s rogue storm trooper Finn. Christie also acted as a series regular on Top of the Lake: China Girl (the second series of the hit limited series co-created by Oscar winning director Jane Campion) and is an accomplished stage actor, having most recently appeared in a 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in London, playing the roles of Titania and Hippolyta.