Part of Game of Thrones featuring Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington, Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
Rise to Fame
She nearly studied history at Cambridge, but missed a required grade by misreading an exam question. Drama school was the fallback. Her first real break came playing Anne Boleyn on The Tudors (2007), where she reportedly pushed back against the show's instinct to make Boleyn a passive victim and fought for a more politically shrewd portrayal. Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones locked it in, a character so closely mirroring Boleyn the comparison writes itself.
In the Spotlight
She's been quietly building something beyond prestige TV. In 2024, she executive-produced and starred in White Lies, a Fremantle thriller filmed in Cape Town. Audrey's Children (2025), where she plays real oncologist Dr. Audrey Evans, won the Feature Film Prize at Tribeca X. When cast in The Lady, she publicly refused to promote it after Sarah Ferguson's Epstein ties became news and donated her entire salary to child abuse charities. That kind of move says more about where she stands than any awards campaign.
Side Notes
The Cambridge near-miss is the one that follows her around. Before The Tudors gave her a foothold, she was waitressing and doing data entry, going through what she has described as depression. At the peak of her Game of Thrones fame, she shaved half her head for Cressida in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. A mezzo-soprano and a fencer since childhood, but at heart, the history major who nearly was.