Lena Headey plays badass queen Cersei Lannister on Game of Thrones, but she’s also a strong woman off camera. Headey revealed that during her first season filming the hit HBO series, she was suffering from undiagnosed postpartum depression.
In an interview conducted by her costar Maisie Williams for Net-A-Porter’s The Edit, the 43-year-old mother of two said filming season 1 right after giving birth to her first child was “really horrendous – I was postnatally depressed but I didn’t know it.”
“I saw a doctor for the medical check, and I just burst into tears,” the actress recalled. “She said I was postnatally depressed and I went, ‘Am I? Why is that?’”
Luckily, she was able to get help. “I saw a great guy and he sorted me out, but I did the first year [on Game of Thrones] in that space, figuring out motherhood and going through a weird time personally. It was tricky,” she admits.
The actress finalized her divorce from former husband Peter Loughran in 2013 and admitted how difficult it was for her years later. “There’s a lot of hurt and sadness and disappointment. Grief. Massive grief. It’s a mourning process, and yet nobody’s died,” she explained of her split in a 2015 interview with More magazine.
“I think some people’s brains are just wired that way if you’re a thinker,” she said of dealing with depression in the same interview. “People who never get anxious always amaze me. The world could be breaking up and they’re saying, ‘Everything’s fine!’ Getting older and having kids, you learn how to become less serious about it all.”
In addition to having son Wylie, 7, with her ex-husband, Headey also has a 23-month-old daughter, Teddy, with her filmmaker fiancé, Dan Cadan.
Season 7 of Game of Thrones premieres July 16 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.