What Happened to Natalie Dormer from Game of Thrones?

Natalie Dormer had amassed a few screen credits in her native Britain when she landed what proved to be her breakout role in 2007, playing Anne Boleyn in the steamy historical drama “The Tudors.” Further film and television parts followed, including such films as “Captain America: The First Avenger,” TV miniseries “The Fades,” and the Madonna-helmed “W.E.” After that, she headed to Westeros.

While there are a number of actors who turned down “Game of Thrones,” Dormer isn’t one of them. In 2012, she took on what remains the role with which she’s most identified: Margaery Tyrell, a shrewd and cunning noblewoman with a talent for psychological manipulation. Dormer was a part of the show until 2016, when — as was often the case on that particular show — her character’s journey came to a fatal conclusion. Eventually, playing the role for so many seasons had led Dormer to absorb the character into herself. “Margaery has been with me now for five years, and she’s — it’s great, she’s a part of my psyche,” Dormer told Women’s Health.

During her tenure on “Game of Thrones,” Dormer also joined the “Hunger Games” cast. In the final two sequels, Dormer’s Cressida assisted Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen take down the Capitol. Since then, she’s continued to expand her roster of screen credits in film and TV, while also marking some special milestones in her personal life.

Like many of the women on “Game of Thrones,” Natalie Dormer’s Margaery Tyrell was a complex hero. She ultimately met her end in a fire during the Season 6 finale. While Dormer would have preferred not to be written out of the show, she did appreciate the unexpected nature of Margaery’s demise. “Every year something comes from the left field that no one could have predicted,” she mused in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “It’s great they can still shock people six years on. I watch as an audience member as well, you get side-swiped.”

Two years later, Dormer admitted that even though she was no longer a member of the cast, she remained a loyal viewer. “I’m excited to see the next season,” she said during a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I’m on the edge of my seat like everybody else.”

In hindsight, Dormer ultimately came to feel that both her entrance and exit from “Game of Thrones” had been perfectly timed. “I got the golden ticket, the perfect length of time,” she told Variety. “I watched Season 1 as a fan, came in the second season, did a good solid five years just as the show had this incredible explosion, and then I got out in time to watch the end and sit on the couch again.”

Following her exit from “Game of Thrones,” Natalie Dormer headed to the West End stage to star in a production of “Venus in Fur.” Dormer portrayed a New York actor who auditions for a theatrical adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s “Venus in Fur,” the 1870 novella that inspired the word “masochism.” “It has this wacky, dark surrealism, but at the same time manages to be incredibly sexy and funny,” Dormer told The Guardian of what attracted her to the project.

“Venus in Fur” reunited Dormer with stage director Patrick Marber, who’d previously directed her onstage in “After Miss Julie” back in 2012. Despite the show’s provocative subject matter — or perhaps because of it — Dormer predicted British audiences would enjoy the show. “We pretend we’re all buttoned-up and strait-laced, but you only need to look at the Victorians to know the British get very kinky under the collar,” she said.

Not only did the play bring her back to the West End, “Venus in Fur” also introduced her to her co-star, David Oakes. Oakes would go on to play a key role in Dormer’s life in the years that followed, with the pair embarking on a romantic relationship that, as of 2024, is still going strong.

After her sojourn onstage, Natalie Dormer debuted another television project, the 2018 miniseries “Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Described by Deadline as a “reimagining” of the Australian mystery novel of the same name, Dormer played the overbearing headmistress of a boarding school for young women in 1900. “She’s running from a past — she’s literally running,” Dormer told Variety of her character, Mrs. Appleyard. “She’s victimized and haunted by her past and her secrets, and her way of trying to deal with that is holding it tightly and putting a lid on it and being this tyrant.”

That same year saw the release of two more projects starring Dormer, the movies “Patient Zero” and “In Darkness.” In “Patient Zero,” Dormer co-starred with Matt Smith (whose credits include “Doctor Who,” Netflix’s royal drama “The Crown,” and the “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon”).

“In Darkness,” however, represented a big step for Dormer, who co-wrote the script and spearheaded the film’s production after becoming frustrated by the quality of roles that were coming her way. “There was a drought of intelligent thrillers when we started writing this seven years ago,” she told The Independent of the film, which she co-wrote with her then-partner, Anthony Bryne, who also directed. “It is really liberating,” she said, expressing pride in having taken control by writing a great movie role for herself.

Natalie Dormer is not part of the “Harry Potter” movie franchise, but she is a part of the Wizarding World. In 2018, she entered the franchise through a side door when she was tapped to narrate an original audiobook for Audible, “Harry Potter: A History of Magic.”

According to the audiobook’s synopsis, listeners were treated to a deep dive into the lore of the real-world history and artifacts that inspired the magical world at the heart of the book series and the various film adaptations. According to Dormer, she was already a fan. “I’ve always adored the ‘Harry Potter’ books, but it wasn’t until I started speaking with the British Library’s curators — hearing about the various myths, legends, and cultures that have helped shape the wizarding world — that I really began to appreciate the richness and depth of J.K. Rowling’s writing,” Dormer said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. “There are so many wonderful details to explore, and ‘A History of Magic’ unearths some remarkable gems of information that are sure to have listeners awestruck. It’s been fun to join the Wizarding World family.”

In a promotional video for the project, Dormer underwent a virtual version of the iconic Hogwarts sorting ceremony to find out what house she would be in if she were a student at the magical school. “I’m Hufflepuff!” Dormer declared. “That’s not what I was expecting.”

Natalie Dormer’s not one to mince words when it comes to onscreen nudity and sex scenes, and yet her take has still been misconstrued. “I have been misquoted and taken out of context quite regularly on the subject of sex onscreen,” Dormer explained in an interview with The New Statesman, acknowledging she didn’t really have any way to correct the record without blowing things even further out of proportion. “How absurd to go, ‘Should I just tweet to say that journalist took my words completely out of context?’ It creates another story,” she added.

During the interview, Dormer referenced a section in her Wikipedia page, observing that she’s frequently appeared naked on camera, and that she’s claimed to be “comfortable” acting in nude scenes. However, The New Statesman pointed to several earlier interviews in which she’d pretty much stated the exact opposite. “It’s very traumatic, it really is,” she told The Independent of nude scenes in 2011.

She shared her definitive opinion with The New Statesman. “To set the record straight, I have never been comfortable doing sex or nude scenes. Are you joking? How many people would be?” she said, revealing she’d passed up roles that involved sex scenes because she was fearful of sustaining the incorrect image of her that the media had been running with. “I’m so terrified at the moment of perpetuating that clickbait image of me,” Dormer explained.

Natalie Dormer’s philanthropic side came to the forefront in 2019. That year, she headlined an advertising campaign for Childline, a British charity run by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) offering assistance and resources to children who’ve been victims of sexual abuse. Over the years, Dormer has been highly active with Childline; in 2020, for example, she appeared in a video that featured her visiting a Childline call center during a night shift.

In 2021, Dormer — who served as an ambassador for the organization — narrated an audio version of “Pantosaurus And The Power Of PANTS,” a children’s book produced by the NSPCC intended to give families with young children a way to discuss how certain parts of the body should remain off-limits to others.

Dormer had cause for celebration in 2023, when the Online Safety Act became law in Britain, placing the onus on tech companies to protect children being targeted by sexual abuse on various online platforms. “One of the key points of the act is that parents and children have easy access to remove harmful, disturbing and damaging content that they are exposed to or have been victimized by, and to give that the greatest accessibility and ease for your parent readership is pivotally the most important thing,” Dormer told Hello! magazine.

Co-writing a movie in which she could star was just one way in which Natalie Dormer attempted to take control over her career. In 2019, she took the further step of forming her own production company, which she dubbed Dog Rose Productions. As Variety reported, major production company Fremantle had a first-look deal with Dog Rose Productions’ proposed projects.

The first two collaborations from Fremantle and Dog Rose were “Vivling,” a biopic about “Gone With the Wind” star Vivien Leigh, and a historical series about female aviators during the Second World War, titled “Spitfire Sisters.” Playwright Morgan Lloyd Malcolm was tapped to write the series based on the true story of the women who flew aircraft from base to base for Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary during WWII. “This is a barely known story, a thrilling story; an important story ready to be told by such a passionate voice as Morgan’s,” said Dormer in a statement to Deadline.

Interviewed by Drama Quarterly, Dormer revealed that the relationship she’d forged with Fremantle while filming “Picnic at Hanging Rock” led her to partner with them when she launched her production company. “I trusted the Fremantle global drama team because I had been developing stuff with them since I had such a wonderful experience with them on ‘Picnic,'” she said.

Natalie Dormer took on what was arguably her meatiest role to that point when she was cast in “Penny Dreadful: City of Angels,” a Los Angeles-based 2020 followup to the Victorian-era horror series “Penny Dreadful.” “It was just a challenge that I didn’t want to pass up,” she said in a Showtime video profiling her character — or, rather, characters — in the show. As Dormer explained, she portrayed Magda, a shape-shifting demon that she described as the series’ “supernatural antagonist,” who manifests as four distinct entities: Magda herself, sporting a bat-like black leather gown; Elsa, a German immigrant; Rio, a tough-as-nails member of L.A.’s Pachuco gang; and Alex, a bespectacled assistant to a local politician.

As Dormer told Variety in 2020, Magda’s nefarious mission is to nudge humanity toward a path of evil and mayhem. “She basically believes that mankind is inherently bad — that they will choose the baser, more selfish, more egocentric route whenever given a fork in the road,” she said.

The inherent challenge, Dormer told Entertainment Weekly, was to ensure the characters she inhabits are standalone and three-dimensional, and not merely aspects of Magda. “When I play Elsa, I’m not playing Magda walking along in the faux-leather dress,” she said. “I have to play Elsa, who’s a true, full characterization. I have to believe in those individuals as if they were real humans and forgetting there was a puppet master [Magda] above.”