Game of Thrones star GEMMA WHELAN on why her description of ‘frenzied’ incest scene was taken out of context – and how she’s left all behind to become one of TV’s most versatile faces

• Actress Gemma Whelan, from Leeds, says her description of those scenes as ‘a frenzied mess’ has been taken out of context
• READ MORE: Game of Thrones star is unrecognisable as he makes his TV return

I meet Gemma Whelan in a café near her home in South London, where she’s been enjoying five minutes of zen peace before I arrive. She hugs me, her calm spreading instantly over me. 

As well as an actress, it turns out she trained as a yoga teacher, ‘because my mum said I’d need something to fall back on – all the faith!’

With two young children and a burgeoning TV career, she has to take these moments where she can: it turns out the fallback option was not required.

Whelan, 42, says that people don’t recognise her in public – she has one of those famous faces you can’t place. 

But many will know her from Game of Thrones as Yara Greyjoy, one of the few characters who lived until the end of the show, unkillable: ‘I’m still ruling the Iron Islands somewhere,’ she says. 

Dress, Karina Bond. Earrings, Eshvi, from Koibird. Socks, Falke. Sandals, Gina

Other hit TV roles have included Marian, sister of Anne Lister, in the 19th-century drama Gentleman Jack, and Kate in Upstart Crow, the BBC2 sitcom about Shakespeare.

She is currently playing two detectives: in the ITV dramas DI Ray (series two, recently completed, will be shown in 2024) and The Tower II: Death Message, the second season of the crime thriller series. We’re here to talk about the latter, set in a multicultural part of London where tensions run high.

The show centres around Farlow police station, where we last saw DS Sarah Collins, played by Whelan, given the unpopular job of investigating her own colleagues after a police officer and a young girl fell to their deaths from a tower block in mysterious circumstances.

Both series are based on the first and second novels in the Metropolitan trilogy by Kate London, a former murder squad detective – ‘She has a feast of knowledge of what it’s actually like,’ says Whelan. 

‘I completely underestimated it; I thought, one death a month maybe, the occasional big murder a year. No, it’s 11 or 12 a week in London. We just don’t hear about most of them.’

Whelan grew up wanting to be a detective, but admits she was naive about what it entailed before she played this part. A lot of the extras were retired detectives, so Whelan asked them constantly for advice – although once, in character, she pulled off a forensic suit and shoved it in a bin while talking.

‘They were, like, “No, stop, it’s evidence. It has to go in an evidence bag. You’ll get letters sent in!” But there has to be a bit of artistic licence, or every episode would be four hours long.’

Dress and top, A-Jane. Tights, Tabio. Sandals, Gina

It’s vastly different from her role in Game of Thrones, in which her sex scenes rank among the most notorious in TV history, not least incest with her brother Theon, played by Alfie Allen. She says her description of those scenes as ‘a frenzied mess’ has been taken out of context. 

While intimacy co-ordinators didn’t exist at the time, she says the cast worked it out together respectfully. ‘You’d say to the other person, “How about this, shall we do this, are you OK if I do this – ooh, this feels a bit weird, doesn’t it!”’

The real fruity chaos was on stage at London’s Soho Theatre in 2014, when she performed a monologue by Philip Ridley called Dark Vanilla Jungle, ‘which became very frenzied and sexual and wild – and with my mum and dad in the audience’.

I’m intrigued to know how sexually frenzied a one-woman play can become. She splutters, laughing, at which point we notice that the yummy-mummy café we are sitting in has gone very quiet – but Whelan is undeterred.

‘I mean, there was a masturbation section, which no one needs their dad to see. But I’m also not someone who will back off from that,’ she adds. ‘You don’t want to watch someone not commit to something, because that’s more embarrassing. So I knew they were in the audience one night and I still went for it.’

Jacket, shorts and beret, Shrimps. Tights, Tabio

Talking about her dad brings up a wave of sadness ‘because he was a real champion of me; he was always the one saying, “I absolutely believe in you, you’ll win a Bafta.” 

‘We used to watch The Graham Norton Show together and I said, “Ooh, I’d love to be on that one day.” And he’d say, “You will be!” And I was, but,’ she says, blinking away a tear, ‘he didn’t live long enough to see it.’

He died of cancer in 2016, when Whelan was shooting Moorside, the true story of Karen Matthews, who in 2008 staged the kidnapping of her nine-year-old daughter Shannon for money. 

Whelan and co-star Sheridan Smith found themselves in an unlikely shared predicament: ‘Oh god, it’s so sad,’ she says. ‘Both Sheridan’s and my father were diagnosed with the same kind of incurable cancer on the Monday, before we started shooting on the Thursday. 

AS YARA GREYJOY WITH HER BROTHER THEON (PLAYED BY ALFIE ALLEN) IN GAME OF THRONES

‘Hers survived a bit longer, till the winter; my dad passed away in the August. I miss him terribly, although I feel, somehow, that he left me equipped; that father-daughter relationship, if you get a good one, is unique. But it is like losing your roof, your fundamental champion.’

Whelan and her husband Gerry Howell, 43, a comedian and playwright turned psychotherapist, weren’t sure they would ever have children. In fact, her dad had begged her not to, on his deathbed.

‘He said, “Will you promise me not to have children?” But only because of the state of the world that I would be bringing them into. I mean,’ she says, ‘the world he left behind was peachy compared to now. 

‘Seven years ago, Brexit hadn’t been finalised, there was still a bit of hope and decent weather; a relative utopia. But I fully agreed with him. Then he passed away and the urge to make my own children was’, she gasps as if winded, ‘so strong. And just over a year later [daughter] Frances arrived.

‘It is strange how it happened. Gerry and I had been together for years, quite content, like, “Guess we don’t need children, we’re having fun, aren’t we? This is fine.”

WITH HUSBAND GERRY HOWELL AND DAUGHTER FRANCES, 2020

‘But you grow up quickly when you lose a parent. It’s a seismic shift. I wanted to make my own family.’

They rushed through a wedding when she was five months pregnant, she says, chuckling. ‘Outrageous! We had to go to the register office and just get it done.’ She wore a blue silk dress she had seen while passing a sari shop on Oxford Street.

‘I thought, that’s lovely. Not cultural appropriation, just a really nice dress.’ Their daughter, Frances, now five, was born a few months later, joined by her brother Freddie in 2021. While we are talking,

Howell texts a photo of the toddler and she gazes at it. ‘Oh god he’s so cute, Fred bear!’ Around the time of Frances’s birth, Howell started training as a psychotherapist, something she says has been ‘invaluable’ as they both read up a lot on how our psychology is formed in childhood.

She laughs, though, about trying to be a good parent when your kid is making demands.

‘You know, when you’re in trouble for cutting the banana in half and you want to scream, “It’s just a banana! You’re so lucky to have a banana! Do you know how many children don’t have bananas?” 

‘But instead you breathe and say, “I’m so sorry, shall we try and stick it back together? Shall we get a different banana and Mummy eat this one?” And then you think, “Oh my god, who am I?”

I do try to arrest the shouty parts of me but it’s hard. And if you do shout, it’s also human. “Mummy gets angry, Mummy gets sad, Mummy gets all sorts, just like you”.’

Whelan’s career began in comedy, having done stand-up as a module on her performing arts degree at Middlesex University, although her first comic role was an accident. 

Aged five, in a local ballet show in Leeds (where she lived until the family moved to Warwick), Whelan was supposed to skip round in a circle with all the other girls.

She went the wrong way, ‘so everyone else fell down like dominos. I was the last one standing, having knocked everyone over. 

‘The audience fell about laughing and my mum says I didn’t get upset at all. I was like, “ta-da!” I remember being on stage and enjoying being the spectacle, whether it was good or bad.’

Her dad worked in an office, her mum as a teacher and receptionist. ‘They had met while doing amateur dramatics, it’s just that their options weren’t to be creative as a lifestyle.’ 

They wanted their daughter to have the opportunities they’d lacked. ‘So perhaps my mum saw a light come on in me that day.’

Whelan was so dedicated to dance school she would spend entire Saturdays there. She certainly hasn’t lost her agility, as the image of her high-kicking on the cover of this issue shows. 

WITH CO-STAR JIMMY AKINGBOLA IN THE TOWER II: DEATH MESSAGE

She was in all the school plays, too – notably playing Daisy in Daisy Pulls It Off – always staying behind to practise more. ‘I’m not sure anyone even asked me to do the plays, I just burned to do them.’ It was a private girls’ school: ‘The other girls had cottoned on to boys whereas I didn’t understand that they existed.’

As a teenager, she became anorexic and was hospitalised. She has previously described overcoming the eating disorder as her ‘greatest achievement’ and says the experience shaped her personality, but feels she has said enough about it for now. 

A personal heroine throughout was I Love Lucy actress Lucille Ball. ‘The largesse, the strength – she was a force, wasn’t she? I guess she made me feel brave, she showed me what I could do. Kathy Burke was another inspiration, fearless of being, you know, not the pretty one, because I’m not the pretty one,’ Whelan says calmly.

‘This is not to be self-deprecating, because it does mean I can be all sorts. Yes, I can glam up but I can also be really ugly – that’s where the character is. The freedom not to be frightened of going to the edge of that.’ 

She also thinks it might give her a certain career longevity that beauty wouldn’t. ‘There’s no cut-off point for ugly muglies,’ she says, laughing.

As a young graduate she would sit down every Monday with an industry printout of small acting roles and send letters and photographs to every one: ‘From my little flat in Greenwich, where I lived in the lounge – me and two boys were sharing it and we couldn’t afford a three-bed. 

‘I was driven – there was no alternative. I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I was going to make this happen in any way possible.’

What about the little voice in you that says you’re rubbish, you’ll never make it?

‘Umm,’ she says, thinking, and I realise she didn’t have one but is considering the most diplomatic way to answer. ‘Again, I don’t want to sound arrogant but there wasn’t a voice. It’s not that I thought, “You’re the best”, but more like, there’s a quiet place inside you where you know you’re on the right path.

‘Whether it works out or not is another question. I’m on this path and there is no doubt that it’s the right path. I’m loving this journey, so let’s see where it goes.’

• The Tower II: Death Message starts tomorrow at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX 

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