"Game of Thrones" season five did not miss out on introducing new characters for fans to love and despise, and one of the characters that might have fallen into the latter category is none other than Ramsay Bolton's mistress Myranda, who is played by Charlotte Hope.
The show's director Jeremy Podeswa is quite impressed with how the actress managed to conquer the complex role and make her character appear both "disturbing" and "charismatic."
Myranda and Ramsay go way back, explained Podeswa, so for Sansa Stark to suddenly come into the picture and claim the marriage Myranda wanted so desperately from Ramsay was not something that would sit well for her.
"The new dynamic in seeing her and Sansa is a really fascinating one, so we talked about that a lot," he told Deadline. "She has a history with Ramsay that goes really far back. They've known each other for many years and he's had many women in between but they have a unique relationship. There's something about her that really connects with him. She has a little bit of what Ramsay has a lot of, which is a kind of reckless-I don't want to say crazy because it's too simplistic a word, really-but a kind of willful, sadistic streak."
Podeswa believes that the fact that Myranda can "play" with Ramsay is why she lasted as long as she did in her life, and even considers Myranda as Ramsay's perfect "match."
Sansa, on the other hand, is appalled and disgusted by Ramsay's behavior, and try as she might to convince herself that she can handle herself in their marriage, she is only fooing herself.
"Sansa walks into this relationship with Ramsay with her eyes open but feeling that she can handle whatever is going to come her way because she's a strong woman. But she does find, the first hint of it being with Myranda, that she's a bit out of her depth in this situation," said the director.
As much as he raves about Hope's portrayal of Myranda, Podeswa tried to tiptoe on the controversial scene of Ramsay raping Sansa during their wedding night, although he said that they tried to handle the scene as delicately and carefully as they could.
"To be honest I can't speak to that scene too much. I can say that I think the dialogue that came out of that when the show aired was very interesting to me," he said. "We expected a certain amount of controversy because people had really felt a strong connection to Sansa and had really seen Sophie Turner grow up on the show, like literally grow up. People are very invested in her as a character so anything that might happen to her is something that is going to affect the viewers a lot."
