On Cersei's End

Lena Heady has spoken out about Cersei's death in Game of Thrones:

“I will say I wanted a better death.”

In the penultimate episode Cersei was crushed by falling masonry along with her brother-lover Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). It was an underwhelming end, to put it politely.

“Obviously you dream of your death,” she says. “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.”

I agree that the way she and Jaime died was pretty anti-climactic.

Of course, the producers already had Cersei suffer the ultimate degradation of being perp-walked naked through King's Landing while being jeered at by the townsfolk, and that seems to be the Worst Thing they ever envisioned happening to her. Along with Dany, I think the show simply ran out of ideas for the two female characters who had consolidated the most political power in Westeros and couldn't fathom an end for them other than "becomes evil, then dies." Running concurrently, of course, was Jon Snow's storyline which, I guess, demonstrated that anyone supposedly fit to rule, and who was an inherently good person, wouldn't want the job, would be too weak to even try, or would never actually garner enough support to rise to the throne.

As the finale has marinated a bit, this "lesson" about human nature and power has been, I think, one of the more disappointing from the series not just because it is pessimistic, but also uncreative. It seems far more difficult to show us a world, and model of leadership, that is more nuanced or even transformative.

Dany, for instance, had been the Breaker of Chains. I would have been satisfied with an ending that leveraged this past so that she ultimately helped liberate King's Landing from Cersei's rule and, along the way, come to some realization that monarchy is regressive. Instead, they had her go full totalitarian, based on the fact that she had always felt entitled to throne, worked with a single-minded purpose for 8 season to achieve that aim, and apparently learned no real lessons about power and leadership along the way.

Alternatively, and this might seem counter to what I've just said above, but I would have been satisfied with an ending in which Cersei kept the throne after having simply waited for her enemies to deplete their ranks fighting the White Walkers and each other. It's pessimistic, sure, but it would have been a different lesson about how and when to allocate resources for in-fighting v. existential threats, which seems highly relevant today and always.

Anyway, in the interview cited above, Heady mentioned that the cast is in a WhatsApp group where they talk about the show, and oh to be a fly on that virtual wall.