Lena Headey Trivia: 33 facts you didn’t know about the actress!

Lena Headey is an English actress and voice actress. Headey is best known for portraying Cersei Lannister in HBO’s hit fantasy series Game of Thrones since 2011, a performance that has earned her three consecutive Emmy award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

Let’s learn some interesting facts about her!

1.Lena Headey was born October 3, 1973 in Hamilton, Bermuda.

2.She is the daughter of Sue and John Headey.

3.Her father, a Yorkshire police officer, was stationed at Hamilton at the time of her birth.

4.She has one younger brother, Tim.

5.The family moved to Somerset when she was five, and then to Shelley, West Yorkshire, when Headey was eleven.

6.As a child, she took ballet lessons, before being told to stop.

7.Headey had her first experience of acting when she was a pupil at Shelley College; she was noticed at age 17, when performing in a school production at the Royal National Theatre, and was picked for a role in the 1992 film Waterland.

8.Kid can’t take proper care of themselves nor their pets. The notion was enforced when Headey revealed that as a child she had two hamsters and some goldfish.

9.She decided to give her goldfish a big Jacuzzi for fun and ended up boiling up one, alive. She must have been horrified.

10.Peter Dinklage and Headey were friends before “Game of Thrones,” prompting the actor to recommend the English actress for the role of Cersei Lannister.

11.She practices boxing and yoga in her free time in order to stay fit.

12.She’s Vegetarian. Although Headey has licked a toad once in her role for a movie called The Brother’s Grimm, she’s very much a vegetarian.

13.She’s done work with PETA in the past and once refused to skin a rabbit in a movie role. They gave her a fake one instead and she got through it.

14.One sure mark of Game of Thrones is the very vivid sex scenes.  Cersei is not really Cersei in any of those scenes. Meaning, Headey uses a body double in her sex scenes. That’s an interesting fact considering how many sex scenes she’s had to shoot and with the variety of people.

15. Headey sees ghosts, like real live ghosts—at least that’s what she says.

16.Her supernatural sighting claims begin as a little girl when Headey says she saw a ghost in her home.

17.She also claims to have seen a young girl ghost in a hotel in France.

18.She was bullied because of her accent as a child. After being born into a working-class family, her mother decided to send Headey to elocution lessons in order to ‘speak like a lady’, but that didn’t seem to go down well with some of the locals. Headey recalls being hit over the head with a cricket bat by a boy confused by her accent, after asking where the local playing fields were, and the theme continued into later life.

19.She told Men’s Health: “I was having a drink with my mates, and one girl (who we always had trouble with) said, ‘Oh, you think you’re so f***ing good coming back here, don’t ya?’ Then she punched me in the eye, and I showed up on my first day of a Disney film with a real shiner.”

20.Headey was once engaged to The Departed, Elysium, and Invictus actor Johnny Cicco

21.She later dated “The Jungle Book” co-star Jason Flemyng (“Snatch”) for nine years and has a tattoo of his name in Thai on her arm.

22.Upon their break up, she reportedly had a romance with Brazilian model Marcos Domina, then she married musician Peter Loughran in 2007.

23.The couple had a son, Wylie Loughran, before they separated in 2011 and eventually divorced two years later.

24.She has spoken about suffering from postpartum depression following Wylie’s birth.

25.In February 2015, Headey confirmed she was expecting her second child in the summer.On 16 April 2015, Headey stated that the baby will be a girl. On 10 July 2015, she gave birth to her second child, a daughter.

26.Lena says that in real life she doesn’t really resemble any of the characters she has played.

27.She loves horror movies.

28.One would hardly expect an actor being shy but Lena has often mentioned in interviews that she is a shy kind of person. Acting is her craving, she loves the craft of it but is uncomfortable with the fame aspect that comes with the career.

29.One of Headey’s female fans once approached her and showed the actress her “300” inspired wedding album, in which the bride dressed up as Headey’s character, Queen Gorgo, for her special day.

30.She has two dogs, named Wizard and Angela Lansbury.

31.She is an avid Twitter user. She thinks it to be a great way of connecting with people and whenever she is stuck somewhere, she says she shoots out a tweet

32.Headey is obsessed with tattoos, with several splashes of ink covering large sections of her back including a large lotus flower, colourful birds and several butterflies, as well as the name of her ex-boyfriend Jason written on her arm in Thai.

33.It has reportedly proved challenging for the Game of Thrones team to cover up the tattoos during some of Headey’s scenes, including one from the new season, which took a long makeup session to hide.