The former Games of Thrones actor has risen from Hollyoaks to Hollywood, playing the lead in a female-led horror-thriller film.

From dragons to vampires might not be the most tried and tested trajectory, but Nathalie Emmanuel has made it work, playing heroine Evie in new horror-thriller film, The Invitation. The English actor and model, 33, is best known for playing her Games of Thrones character, Missandei, a former slave who serves as Handmaiden and advisor to Daenerys (played by Emilia Clarke). Soap fans will have known her long before: Nathalie’s television career began in Hollyoaks, where she played the character of Sasha Valentine between 2006 and 2010.

GLAMOUR has interviewed Nathalie several times, most recently back in 2020, where she spoke about her secret shyness and how her Games of Thrones role “pulled her out of a slump” in her acting career. Today, she’s on top of the world – energised and enthusiastic about her recent leading role. We discuss her latest film, the mixed blessing of playing the central role in a horror film (and what she does to “come down” after her working day). Plus, Nathalie explores why horror is such a compelling genre to access the difficult themes of racial and social discrimination (she is of Dominican heritage, through her mother, and Saint-Lucian/English heritage through her father), and the “gaslighting” that surrounds it.

You’re most famous for your recurring role on Game of Thrones, where you were very much part of an ensemble cast. What was it like being at the helm, in The Invitation, playing the main character Evie?

It was a welcome challenge to be honest. The responsibility was a whole other level to what I had previously experienced. I felt like I had been building towards it for many years and finally I got the opportunity to lead a movie. I mean, it was tough, for all the reasons you can imagine. I’m pretty much in like almost every scene, and it was a big undertaking to build and map the character across that much material. There’s just so much more work involved, but I was just incredibly excited to have that opportunity, and it’s an experience I hope to continue to keep doing.

Are you a horror fan yourself, in your spare time?

I wouldn’t say I have a hardcore knowledge about the horror genre, but I’ve always enjoyed horror and thriller movies because it’s such an escapist sort of journey that you get to experience. I know it can be gory and scary at times, but there’s something about the not knowing and the trying to work it out. You’re playing detective. I love how [the viewer] is so interactive while watching a horror. You just have to tell yourself: the blood is not real. Once you’re past that part, you can enjoy the experience. It’s like in comedy, you enjoy the landing of a joke and how it makes you laugh. And I think to an extent you can enjoy the pent-up suspense and then the moment of the scare.
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The ‘Game of Thrones’ alum also shares her reaction to ‘House of the Dragon’ and looks ahead to ‘Fast X.’

[The following story contains spoilers for The Invitation.]

The Invitation was Nathalie Emmanuel’s first time being number one on a major studio film’s call sheet, and now she can say that she’s led her first number-one movie at the domestic box office. Jessica M. Thompson’s supernatural horror film opened with $7 million, which was enough to top a quiet weekend at the box office, but a win is a win, especially for a $10 million-budgeted genre pic.

The film follows Emmanuel’s Evie, a floundering New York City artist who takes a DNA test that eventually connects her to a previously unknown English cousin named Oliver Alexander (Hugh Skinner). The Alexander family turns out to be quite wealthy, and Oliver urges Evie to attend a family friend’s wedding in the English countryside. Despite the objections of her best friend, Grace (Courtney Taylor), Evie makes the trip, only to gradually realize that she’s been positioned to be the new bride of Dracula (Thomas Doherty’s Walter DeVille).

Evie ultimately survives the trap she’d been placed in by Oliver, but the response from early test screenings wanted more of a comeuppance for her deceitful cousin. Most of all, test audiences wished to see Grace again after Evie overcame vampires in England. So the cast and crew reunited many months later to shoot a coda that addressed these loose threads, which also explains Emmanuel’s cool new haircut in the added scene.

“From what I’ve been told, it was simply that Courtney Taylor is fantastic, and Grace and Evie, together, was so fun and [test audiences] wanted to see them again,” Emmanuel tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So it was really lovely that people wanted to see these two friends and fiery women kick ass together.”

The Emmy-nominated actor, who’s most known for her role as Missandei on Game of Thrones, also recently starred in Matthias Schweighöfer’s Army of Thieves, the well-received spinoff of Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. With plans for more Army-verse stories, the question remains if Emmanuel’s Gwen will get to reunite with Schweighöfer’s Dieter, something Thieves set up.
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The actress on her latest horror movie role, her life post-Game of Thrones and why she’s still battling for better representation

For a woman best known as a Game of Thrones character, Nathalie Emmanuel is doing her level best to not sit still. In fact, typecast Emmanuel at your peril. A consummate, lifelong performer, her career began as a child playing Nala in the West End production of The Lion King and in the last few years, she has become a hacker in The Fast and the Furious franchise, turned her hand to comedy – in both Hulu’s Four Weddings and a Funeral and in her Emmy-nominated turn in Die Hart, alongside John Travolta and Kevin Hart – and found herself cast in cinematic legend Francis Ford Coppola’s next project. Her career’s variety is impressive and, lately, there has not been a sword or dragon in sight.

It’s why her latest move makes sense. Emmanuel will next be seen in The Invitation, a good old-fashioned gothic horror movie. “I’ve always been really interested in trying my hand at all kinds of genres,” she tells me. “It was something I hadn’t done before and I was so eager to try.”

The shoot in Budapest was, by all accounts, hugely fun, if exhausting. “I mean, practically, playing sheer terror and trauma is very, very tiring,” she says. “It’s a useful sensation though, because though you feel like there’s nothing left; you have to keep pushing through. And that’s true of when you’re a character trying to survive a horror!”

Yet The Invitation is more than its blood-soaked parts. When Emmanuel’s recently orphaned American artist Evie finds British relatives through an online DNA test, she accepts an invitation to a family wedding at an aristocratic estate – one that she ends up wishing she hadn’t RSVP’d to. The film is as much an homage to gothic horror tales as it is a commentary on power structures and oppression. It is Get Out meets Bram Stoker.

“I was taken with how the script looked at race, power and class and how all of those things intersect,” she says, noting that one of the things which appealed to her was the film’s director, Jessica M Thompson. “These people are at the of top of that power structure, being very wealthy, being white, being mostly men. Evie, being a biracial working-class woman, is immediately placed in a situation where she is ill at ease. For me, as a woman of colour, who also didn’t come from wealth, I immediately connected with that, and used how I navigate spaces that weren’t necessarily made, or designed for me, to get into the role.”
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“For me, as a woman of colour from a working class background, all of these ideas resonate with me,” she tells ELLE Australia.

The story of Dracula is already well known to the masses—but you haven’t known it like this. New vampire horror film, The Invitation has taken Dracula’s narrative and transformed it into a masterclass of drama, jump-scares and a confronting reflection of society itself.

Leading the film is Game Of Thrones star, Nathalie Emmanuel, who plays Evie, an American woman who is introduced to her long lost relatives in the UK at a family wedding, only to find that their host, Walter (Thomas Doherty), is not everything he seems—he’s a vampire.

“I got shut in a coffin,” Emmanuel tells ELLE over a Zoom interview ahead of the films release. There’s a sense of revulsion in the way she says it as she recalls the moment her character was shut into the wooden box after realising what her relatives are.

“Whether you think that is real or not, getting shut in a box is horrible. Don’t do it! Don’t do it when you’re alive!” She pleads with a laugh.

Emmanuel’s character and her background is central to one of the key themes from the film. After losing her mother, Evie is excited to connect with previously unknown relatives—a rich British family of great privilege who invite her to the estate for a wedding.

When she gets there, it becomes clear how unfairly separated she is from this world of privileged, white upper-class aristocracy.
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“[I’ve had people] touch my hair like it’s a bomb about to go off.”

The Game of Thrones alum, who currently stars in The Invitation, spent her 20s fighting hair discrimination on set. Now 33, she’s made a big change — but there’s “joy, defiance, and empowerment” in her new, cropped look.

In my teens and 20s, I was already acting and started being in the public eye. Suddenly I had to present myself a certain way and had the expectations of the world on me. I felt a bit overwhelmed. My mum was always like, “It’s not about your appearance. You are beautiful. You
don’t need anything. You’re talented, you’re smart, kind, funny.” I could only be me at the end of the day.

But I was on a TV show in England called Hollyoaks, which was a teen show. A lot of students watched it and a lot of the women [in the cast] were very beautiful, glamorous. I definitely tried to become that.

There was a lot of pressure to conform, to have straight hair and do the aesthetic that was very Western/white. Every time I would straighten my hair, people would be like, “Oh, my God, I love your hair! You should do this all the time.” I’d always be like, “Hmm, or not.” I’ve always had quite a strong sense of myself, [but] you do just want to fit in at that age. You tend to be much more vulnerable to influence.

I remember when I first went to America and met other Black and mixed-race women [and they said], “Oh yeah, you need to get a weave. You need to have straight hair.” And I was like, “Really?” I just actively didn’t want to do that. That’s everybody’s choice for themselves. But for me it never felt right. I’ve had my hair damaged on set because someone wasn’t treating it right and literally had to cut off loads of it. That was just really heartbreaking.
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