Gwendoline Christie
Gwendoline Christie is an actor, born 1978.
Gwendoline Christie's first film credits are bit parts for Terry Gilliam, a shopper in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and a woman in a street advertisement in The Zero Theorem. Then Game of Thrones cast her as Brienne of Tarth, one of the few roles in modern television written specifically for a very tall woman who is not going to be softened for anybody's comfort.
She played Brienne straight, which was the hard choice. The character exists in a world that treats her appearance as a standing joke, and Christie gave her enough dignity that the mockery landed on the mockers instead. The show ran for eight years and brought her a Primetime Emmy nomination in 2019.
Star Wars offered scale and not much else. Captain Phasma looks magnificent in chrome across The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi and is barely written, which is not her fault but is a waste. Television has served her far better since, wanting her strangeness rather than just her stature: Lucifer Morningstar in The Sandman, the principal in Wednesday, and Lorne in Severance, which earned a second Emmy nomination in 2025. The small British films are worth knowing too, particularly Peter Strickland's In Fabric and Flux Gourmet, where she is extremely funny in a register almost nobody else can reach.
Movies (16)
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)
- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)
- Confessions II – The Film (2026)
- The Darkest Minds (2018)
- The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
- Welcome to Marwen (2018)
- Game of Thrones: The Last Watch (2019)
- The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)
- Our Friend (2019)
- The Zero Theorem (2013)
- Game of Thrones The IMAX Experience (2015)
- In Fabric (2018)
- Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016)
- Secrets of the Force Awakens: A Cinematic Journey (2016)
- Flux Gourmet (2022)
TV (8)
Where to start with Gwendoline Christie
Game of Thrones is unavoidable and correct. Brienne is the moral centre of a show that spends most of its time arguing there isn't one, and the second and third seasons are where the performance sets.
Severance is the best thing she has done since. Lorne arrives late and immediately rearranges the tone of everything around her, which is a specific and difficult skill.
The Sandman gives her the grandest role of her career and she plays it very quietly, against every instinct the costume suggests. Wednesday is the broader, more enjoyable version.
If you want the actor rather than the icon, In Fabric and Flux Gourmet are the ones: strange, funny British films that use her comic timing properly. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the famous credit and the thinnest part on this list.
Game of Thrones
Brienne of Tarth is the best-written character in the series and the role that made her, a knight in everything but title whose whole arc is about being taken seriously.
The Star Wars films
Captain Phasma is a role that never leaves the armour and never gets the material the design promised, which she has been fairly candid about. The armour is the whole problem: it removes the two things she is best at, which are her face and her height being read as a choice.
The recent television
The Sandman gives her Lucifer, Wednesday a school principal with a history, and Severance an Emmy-nominated part that is mostly stillness and menace. All three arrived within a few years and between them show more range than the decade before them.
The art films
Two Terry Gilliam pictures and two Peter Strickland ones, all of which use her scale as a formal device rather than a joke. In Fabric is the strangest.