Still and Watching Everything

The moment Nathalie Emmanuel walked into Game of Thrones as Missandei—Daenerys’s translator, contained and precise and watching everything from just out of frame—I was done. She’d already appeared in Misfits, the British superhero comedy-drama, which is where I first noticed her, but the HBO show gave her a different register: stillness, intelligence, the quality of someone who knows more than they’re saying and has decided not to say it.

Game of Thrones and its tendency to use nudity as ambient scenery is well established at this point, and Essos in particular runs on the logic that everything should be exposed at all times. Emmanuel ends up in that machinery along with everyone else. I’ll be honest—I’m not watching purely for the dramatic arcs. But she’s also genuinely better than what the show gives her, and that gap is its own kind of frustrating.