Do we like Carice van Houten?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Nothing harmful found in her words or her company, and real climate action at personal cost, with a record that is thinner on other causes.
Carice van Houten is the Dutch actress most of the world knows as the fire priestess Melisandre in Game of Thrones. Her more recent work includes the Dutch drama A Family, which premiered in Berlin in February 2026. Nothing new has surfaced on her lately, and the 2026 gossip-site stories about her are unverified, so we've left them out.
The most telling story is her turn into activism. In 2023 she bought Rabobank certificates with about 80 other Milieudefensie volunteers so they could ask the bank about its emissions. She told NOS she had never been an activist and wanted people to like her. She also admitted she has flown a lot for work, which critics have called hypocritical.
She then went further. In September 2023 she was detained on the A12 motorway at an Extinction Rebellion climate blockade, and Hart van Nederland said it was not her first time, after a blockade in May. The reports we read don't say she was charged. Whether blocking a motorway is your idea of good manners is up to you, but it was not a stunt she could do cheaply.
On the harm test she comes up clean. We found no remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or public health, and no pattern of working with people who push such things. In 2019 she pulled out of a Belgian TV panel because the mayor of Aalst, who defended carnival floats caricaturing Jews, was also booked. The report only gives her reason second-hand, through the presenter, so take it as reported rather than her own words.
On #MeToo she told Deadline in 2019 that dialling down nudity on Game of Thrones showed it wasn't needed. She said she was never forced into anything, though she might have been more cautious in hindsight. It's a thoughtful answer, not a defensive one.
One position is contested. In January 2024 she was among actors who read sections of South Africa's genocide case against Israel for a Palestine Festival of Literature video series. Where you land depends on whether you see that as backing a court case or as taking a side in a war. It is her public act, and we found nothing hateful attached to it.