Cersei’s Best ‘Game of Thrones’ Moment is When She’s Drunk with Sansa

Cersei Lannister has had quite a few big moments on Game of Thrones. There was that time Bran Stark found her schtupping her twin brother in a tower, the moment she blew up the Sept of Baelor, and of course, the scene were she explained to both Ned Stark and the audience that all the characters on the show were playing a “game of thrones” and “you win or you die.” However, Cersei’s finest hour has got to be when she is drunk during the Battle of Blackwater with Sansa Stark.

We know that Cersei Lannister, as played by Lena Headey, likes her wine. She paws at her goblet in moments of triumphant and grasps it harder when she’s feeling stressed. However, our first real encounter with “drunk Cersei” came towards the end of Season 2 in Episode 9, “Blackwater.” As Stannis Baratheon’s forces laid siege to King’s Landing, Cersei and the other noblewomen of the castle were penned up in the Red Keep. With nothing to do but worry about the battle outside, the women needed something to amuse themselves with, and Cersei chose wine.

Now, technically this “scene” is a sequence of four different scenes. The first two repeat themselves structurally insomuch that in both Cersei demands that Sansa (Sophie Turner) join her and have a glass of wine herself, and each scene ratchets up Cersei’s unspooling. It’s not just the alcohol that’s loosening her up, but the threat of death — and losing her children. The Cersei we see here is not the one we’re accustomed to. She’s not poised, but unleashed. She’s not strategic, but she is revealing all of her strategies. In doing so, Cersei is showing us, in real time, the performative nature of her power by letting go of it. (And young Sansa Stark is learning a thing or two about life in the process.)

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Rattled, certain of doom, and drunk, Cersei gets to be emotionally vulnerable in these moments like we haven’t seen before. When she usually confides her feelings about something, she makes sure to maintain some control over herself. She’ll snarl to her twin brother/lover Jaime Lannister, but also have a plan in place. Here, she’s just raw, bitter nerves, cackling at Sansa’s innocence — and her own lost childhood. When Cersei reveals that her father taught her that the gods have no mercy by mocking her for praying for her dead mother to return from the dead, she adds, as an afterthought, that she was only four years old when this happened.

When Cersei laments not being born a boy, she complains about being sold in marriage to Robert, admitting the inequity of the situation and the trauma of marital rape. When Sansa points out that she got to be queen in the bargain, Cersei makes a pointed comment — “And you will be Joffrey’s. Enjoy!” — that confirms she not only understands her son is a monster but that she is also complicit in continuing this cycle of trauma. All of this comes foaming out of her with bitter laughs and a request for more wine.

The beauty of Headey’s performance is how layered it is. What she is doing is breathtakingly complex. Even as she is literally slouching in an armored corset, she is taking her emotional armor off for perhaps the first time in the series. She is revealing how life has hurt her, and she is explaining to Sansa that her defense mechanism is acceptance, anger, and bitterness. All this is done in the trappings of a darkly comic performance from Headey. It is kind of funny to see the master schemer drunkenly making jokes about seducing Stannis Baratheon’s horse, but it’s also heartbreaking when you realize that Cersei is a woman who clings to power because she hasn’t been given enough love. Power is the only thing that Cersei believes will take away the pain. Power is all Cersei Lannister has.

Well, and she has wine.

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