Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick: 'I want to see the Starks take the Iron Throne' (2024)

Catherine Gee

Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick: 'I want to see the Starks take the Iron Throne' (1)

As she treads the boards in her new play Gloria, Ellie Kendrick tells Catherine Gee about Game of Thrones set secrets, her blossoming writing career and why she's not on social media

You might not yet know the name Ellie Kendrick, but you will almost certainly know her most famous line: “Hold the door!” Since that particular episode of Game of Thrones aired last year, the cry has become its own meme. You can even buy themed doorstops celebrating – or, rather, commemorating – the moment when Kendrick’s character Meera shouted to gentle giant Hodor and left him echoing her words.

Yet, surprisingly, it’s not something that people often quote to Kendrick herself, largely because her close friends and family don’t watch Game of Thrones.

“It's such a commitment though, right?” she points out. “If you were to get involved now that's 60 hours of your life.”

Fortunately, they’re always there to support her in person when needed. “They always come to my plays. I've got a very loyal and lovely group of friends who, if I sound the siren, they will come in.”

Kendrick is also not on social media – a deliberate choice on her part – so she misses the extensive online chatter and fan attention that the fantasy series conjures.

“I had Instagram and Facebook a few years ago and initially it was just because I got really distracted and was like, what am I doing with my life?” she explains. “I suppose it became a slightly broader question about how I want to spend my time, how I want to have my conversations and conduct myself in the world, in terms of how I connect to people. I realised that technology was short circuiting that for me. I didn't want to have the sense that I was in a strange capsule that social media creates.”

But times have not yet moved on so much that people no longer send fan mail. And letters are something that Kendrick is more than happy to spend her time on. Every so often, her agent packages them up and sends them on to her. “Nowadays, if you send a letter that's real effort, I applaud that,” she says. “I'm a big fan of letter writing myself. Sometimes it will take me a while but I'll always make the effort to reply.”

Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick: 'I want to see the Starks take the Iron Throne' (2)

I meet Kendrickat the Hampstead Theatre, during a break in the rehearsals of her new play, the Pulitzer Prize finalist Gloria. It's the day after the General Election, which also happens to be the day after her 27th birthday (contrary to what her Wikipedia page says, which wrongly lists it as twodays earlier, onJune 6). But she wasn’t in a position to spend her birthday reading the headlines, having been merrily locked in rehearsals. So did she lose any sleep watching the count during the night?

“I normally stay up all night and watch it," she says. "It's exciting! It's real drama happening right in front of you. But last night I turned in early because I had to get in for rehearsals." Though despite being kept away from the news all day,she isup to date with the results when I ask how her own London constituency of Deptford voted ("Vicky Foxcroft. Labour.") After frequently having to travel hundreds of miles, sheis enjoying being back in her hometown for work,she says - and, impressively, she usually cycles the 10 mile journey from south-east to north-west London.

This production is Gloria’s UK debut, after it premieredoff-Broadway, at the Vineyard Theatre, in 2015. The play, by American playwright and former journalist Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, also stars Merlin’s Colin Morganand depicts the office life of a New York magazine staffed by a mix of beleaguered old-timers and enthusiastic, cocky twentysomethings.

Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick: 'I want to see the Starks take the Iron Throne' (3)

“It's a razor-sharp office comedy about ambition and competitiveness and hierarchy, which then completely flips the audience on their heads and takes you into a world really unexpected,” Kendrick explains. “I play three characters in it, which is a lot of fun because I love doing multi-role stuff. In the first act I play Ani, who is a an office assistant to one of the editors and then go on to play someone else in the publishing industry and then in the final act I play a different character– without giving too much away.”

It’s not too often that a journalist gets to ask an actor questions about playing the role that we live every day. And, though many of us may protest that the environment is not really so petty and destructively ambitious as it is portrayed in Gloria, in his review of the off-Broadway production, the New York Times'critic Ben Brantley declared that, “Yeah, it really kind of is". So, I can't help but ask, has this affected her view of us journalists? For Kendrick, however, it'stheoffice environment that has been far more eye-opening.

“It's funny,” she muses. “I have friends who are journalists but I never see them in the office. I've been very lucky that pretty much my only job has been an actor. Normally most people who work in offices will come to the theatre and see a different world. Whereas I spend most of my time working in theatre and now I'm seeing a different world representing the office. So it's really made me think about office politics, what it would be like to go into the same office every day and be in the same group of people and how you navigate that social situation.”

Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick: 'I want to see the Starks take the Iron Throne' (4)

Kendrick began her career when she was still a teenager andliving in Kent with her parents. As a child actor, she appeared on TV dramas such as Waking the Dead and Doctors andwhen she was 17, she won the lead role in the BBC One drama The Diary of Anne Frank.

“It came at a weird time because as soon as I finished it I had to go into doing my A Levels,” she says. “Then I went into my year out and then I went into university. But it was great because it meant I was able to do TV and film work in my university holidays.”

Then,only weeks after she graduated from Cambridge,Kendrick was called up to audition for Game of Thrones. She’d seen some of it while she was studying but was by no means an avid fan.

“You go into this weird hole where it's the ultimate echo chamber,” she says of undergraduate life. “Where you think 'my finals are the only important thing in the world'or 'this dissertation on Shakespeare's hat is the most important thing'.”

Of course, filming a huge, sprawling series is a very different experience to a play. As a result, Kendrick and her immediate co-stars Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark), Thomas Brodie-Sangster (Jojen Reed) and Kristian Nairn (Hodor) have spenta lot of time together but she sees little of the rest of the cast. The Game of Thrones producers are also so secretive that she doesn’t even get to read the rest of the episodes that she’s in, so she’s almost as much in the dark about most of the coming season as the rest of us.

Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick: 'I want to see the Starks take the Iron Throne' (5)

“Normally you get the sides [the portion of the script that they’re currently shooting] at the beginning of the day. But on Game of Thrones hardly anyone is allowed the pages and even then you have to sign an agreement before they give them to you and you have to hand them back at the end of the day.”

But despite being not quite so in the thick of it,she naturally still has an opinion on that ever-present question of who should sit on the Iron Throne at the end of it all.

“For me, it's always been about a reunion of the Stark children. I think they'd be pretty great rulers,” she says. “Well, maybe a bit questionable, but I think a coalition of power is the only way forward.”

Shooting something like Game of Thones is intense, but only ever for short bursts of a few days. For her starring role in the film The Levelling, a bleak drama about the farming industrythat was released earlier this year to much acclaim, it was much more like hard work. It wasshot over four weeks on a working farm, and the cast and crew were immediatelyput to work milking cows and mucking out. For one scene,Kendrick had to submerge herself from the shoulders down in a freezing, murky reen.

"Itwas probably harder for camera crew than for me, to be honest," she says. "I had a lovely gang of people waiting for me with towels and handwarmers."

Rural Britishlife israrely seen on screen, and the film deftly capturesthe sometimes-damaging level of stoicism that farmers can have about the struggles that the industry faces. “Obviously it was before Brexit that we filmed it,” says Kendrick. “But it became even more relevant afterwards. They're a portion of society that are being really affected by what's happening politically.”

As well as a burgeoning acting career, Kendrick, whose intelligence and natural curiosity exudes from her the minute she starts talking, is also a scriptwriter with several projects on the go – some she can talk about and some she can’t. She’s already hada short play performed at the Royal Court and another upstairs at the Soho Theatre. And has now been commissioned to write a play for the theatre production companyHigh Tide, alongside other projects that she’s developing for a couple of TV production companies (but those are the unconfirmed ones that she doesn’t wish to jinx by giving details).

And, acknowledging her good fortune as a Cambridge graduate from the Home Counties, she spends some of her spare time mentoring a budding teenage actress as part of the Arts Emergency charity – which is designed to provide an “alternative old boys network” to those not lucky enough to already have one. When asked about her volunteering, her already animated face lights up.

“It happens to me all the time, that you look around a rehearsal room or on your TV and you see faces which are all the same and you know where everyone's from. And that needs to change,” she says. “If you're only 17, 18, having someone you can call on can help you dream big.”

Though she’s yet to benefit directly from nepotism, she knows how lucky she is to have a support network of friends who also work in the creative industries and to have been able to work as an actor so young. But, it must be said, for a woman as smart and tireless as Kendrick, there’s definitely a lot more to her success than just luck.

Gloria is showing at the Hampstead Theatre until July 22; box office 020 7722 9301

Game of Thrones returns to Sky Atlantic on 17July at 2am and 9pm

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Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick: 'I want to see the Starks take the Iron Throne' (2024)
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