Gwendoline Christie has said that Game Of Thrones has both opened up her life and shut it down.
The actress, who plays Brienne of Tarth in the popular fantasy-drama series, will soon say goodbye to the role as the final series comes to an end later this month.
Filming on the programme ended last year and the British star said she feels “a lot of things” about her Game Of Thrones career coming to an end.
Christie, 40, told British GQ magazine: “It’s a very strange state of affairs. I feel deeply emotional about it ending, because it was an act of liberation for me, in so many different ways.
“In some ways it really has really opened my life up in ways I could never have expected. And in other ways it really shut my life down.”
She added: “I am really excited to do some new things. I am also very scared not to have that structure in place, because it was so reliable. But reliability is not always necessarily a good thing.”
Christie, who portrays a formidable warrior who stands at more than six feet tall, has also talked about the “agony” of accidentally being hit in the face twice while filming a fight scene by co-star Rory McCann, who plays Sandor “The Hound” Clegane.
Of the incident, which happened in a previous Game Of Thrones series, she said: “I got smacked in the face twice: once with the metal of his armour, the chain mail on the edge.
“Oh god, bless him. He is a really kind generous, wonderful, human being. And he was mortified, it was a genuine accident.
“I fell to my knees and I screamed an expletive. I held my face because I thought my nose was broken. It was agony; it hurt so much and there was that sort of ringing you get in your ears.”
She said that, despite the pain, she knew they had to finish the scene, so she stood up and started spitting “like an animal”.
“I was crying and spitting… like some sort of wrestler about to go back into the fray. There was snot everywhere.
“I just didn’t feel very in control of my own physicality and I was walking up and down, really crying, and then I said, ‘Let’s carry on’: because I knew in that moment if I got scared, I wouldn’t be able to continue.’”
Game Of Thrones’ final-ever episode is scheduled to air in the UK on May 20.
Gwendoline Christie is on one of the covers of British GQ’s June edition to celebrate GQ Heroes, and she will also speak at the GQ Heroes Event May 8-10 at Soho Farmhouse.