‘Game of Thrones’ season 6, episode 1: Director on Melisandre’s age, pivotal scene

The “Game of Thrones” season 6 premiere on Sunday night certainly had a number of key moments, but we do still feel like the biggest one was at the end of the hour with Melisandre. While we still don’t know exactly what she’s going to be doing with Jon Snow (if anything), it’s nice to be able to say with confidence that she is far older than she typically appears. That moment with the red choker is proof of that very thing.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the premiere’s director Jeremy Podeswa described crafting that big moment with Carice van Houten’s character, where you know that she is far older than you would think when first looking at her; however, he also stated that there was specifically some ambiguity when it came to her precise age:

“The idea is there’s an indefinite indeterminate quality that she could be ancient … We were limited by choosing to use a real person rather than a complete CG creation. Because what does a 400-year-old person look like? We don’t know. So if you try to create that, then you’re creating something that looks beyond our known reality. Here you feel like she’s very old without putting a number on it.”

We don’t really think the number matters so much as the context of knowing that this is a woman who has probably experienced devastating wars already. With that, it’s probably easy to assume that she knows a thing or two about how to stop things strategically, and she may advise based on experience just as much as mysticism … even though some of her ideas have not exactly worked so far.

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