Aimee Richardson

"I'm a little girl, and I'm getting to dress up as a princess - and get paid for it! It's mental!"

- Aimee Richardson

Aimee Richardson is an actress who portrays Myrcella Baratheon in Game of Thrones. She is from Bangor, Northern Ireland.

In the pilot episode, Myrcella was a non-speaking role played by Aimee Richardson. She was not originally intended to be cast as Myrcella: no casting decision had been made yet, and she was simply a stand-in for the auditions involving other cast members, such as Cersei and Jaime. However, the TV series creators discovered that they enjoyed Richardson's strong acting ability for her age, so they decided to officially cast her as Myrcella. She initially appeared as a guest star in the first season and returned in this role for the second season.

Richardson won't be appearing in Season 3 because Myrcella has been sent to Dorne, and thus had no scenes in the third book. As Richardson put it in a twitter post just after Season 3 began airing, she's "too busy getting a tan in Dorne to appear in S3."

Similar to Jack Gleeson (who plays her character's older brother Joffrey), Richardson's natural speaking voice has a pronounced Irish accent, and the upper-class, Received Pronunciation accent she adopts while playing Myrcella on-screen is a conscious part of her performance. As Richardson explained, she knew from a young age that if she wanted to become a professional actress, most major roles require a Received Pronunciation accent, so she had been practicing a British-English accent well before casting began for Game of Thrones. She enjoys playing around with different accents at home with her father, and can do a Russian or American South accent reasonably well too.

Richardson hasn't read all of the books - at 15 years old she's only just allowed to watch the show, and even then has to cover her face with a pillow during certain mature scenes. She has read spoilers, however, and looked up what happens to Myrcella in later books, so she knows what's coming for her character.

The day after Joffrey was killed in the Season 4 episode "The Lion and the Rose", Richardson posted a video on her Vine account: it consisted of the last few seconds of Joffrey's poisoning, followed by video of Richardson (with mock solemnity) crowning herself with a tiara, and then announcing "I'm ready" - celebrating that this means Myrcella is now a massive step closer to sitting on the Iron Throne herself.

Quotes
"I'm a little girl, and I'm getting to dress up as a princess - and get paid for it! It's mental!" - In response to the question, "What is your impression of Myrcella's costumes?"

"I'm a very big Audrey Hepburn fan, Breakfast at Tiffany's is my favorite movie in the world. And on my wall behind my bed I have lots of my favorite quotes, and I've got a lot of Audrey Hepburn. And there's one of hers where she said, 'The most important thing is to enjoy yourself, to be happy, that's all that matters.' - and I just think that's a really nice way of living. Not trying to please everyone else, just be happy."

"I love evil characters too, in drama school I've played a few evil characters, and they are SO much fun. You just get to be horrible all day! It's like letting out every little thing inside you you've ever kept in, and all of a sudden you're just like "A HATE YOU ALL!" - So Cersei! Cersei, basically."

Asked if she wants to play Cersei: "Ultimately I think I'd go for Daenerys, because she is BAD ASS, and she got dragons! Who doesn't want dragons? And not just one she's got three of them. So yeah, Daenerys would be it for me, but Cersei is a close second."

"I had this scene when I was being sent off to Dorne, and I was in my little boat, I had to cry during that. Which, well that was my last day of filming for Season 2, I knew I wasn't coming back for a while. So I was already feeling emotional about that, and I then I just kind of thought about what she [Myrcella] would be feeling. And she wasn't going to see her family for, maybe, years. And then I kind of though, 'I'm not going to see them for years!' - so it was pretty easy to get the tears."