Many Game of Thrones fans like to see Melisandre as a villain type character, echoing how Liam Cunningham’s Davos sees her. Her over the top religion has been viewed as charlatan work, and with good reason. As we saw in Season 2 can be a lot of pyrotechnics and magic tricks–at least when she’s doing things for public consumption. (The shadowbaby, on the other hand, was definitely not. But it wasn’t exactly “good magic” either.) When she rode away in last season’s finale, leaving Stannis to the slaughter, there were fans who saw this as the ultimate proof of Melisandre having lead the eldest Baratheon on, and then abandoned him after killing his only child. She must never have believed in him, or this Azor Ahai Reborn stuff. It was all false flattery.
But van Houten wants everyone to know, that’s not true. Melisandre did in fact believe Stannis was the One and True King. She saw things in the flames that made her believe he was the the one come again to fight evil. She thought when she was doing things like having his shadowbabies and burning Shireen alive that it was a case of ‘the ends justify the means.” she was doing these things because Stannis’ cause was right. She was just as much a true believer as Seylse and Stannis.
But now the Baratheons are dead. Whatever it was that Melisandre saw in the fire that made her think he was the true king was wrong….either she misunderstood it, or even worse, it lied to her. And now she is responsible for his death, and Shireen’s and Seylse’s and all of it. It doesn’t matter if the fire lied to her, or if she misread it–the fact still remains, she was wrong. And that has shaken her to the core, in van Houten’s words to The Express, Melisandre is “utterly confused” buy how everything went sideways.
“What the f*** is happening? She’s been on this mission and all of a sudden it makes no sense and her tricks didn’t work – the sacrifice of this girl didn’t work. But I think it’s slowly getting to her that she might have been slightly wrong about things, so that’s where we leave her in season five and that’s definitely where she starts off in season six.”
As for the sacrificing of “the girl” van Houten talks about how great it was to have such an epic scene, while realizing how badly it would play to those at home. “I was happy that it was going to be such an epic scene but at the same time I was like: ‘Oh my god, this is not going to help me’. All the Joffrey hate is going straight to me now.”
She says she knows the audience will forgive her if….if she brings Jon Snow back. But as she’s suggested before, that redemption isn’t going to go as audiences expect. But there is something coming in the first episode which she thinks audiences will look forward to. “…Something else, funny enough. What you’re fishing for, it’s something else.”
“Yes, there was something that I was like, I knew it was coming at some point. People had talked about it before to me but I wasn’t sure when it was going to happen. This is really vague… it’s in episode one already.”
I suppose we will have to wait until April 24th to find out what it is…
Via http://winteriscoming.net/2016/03/30/carice-van-houten-on-how-melisandres-faith-is-shaken/
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