Cersei Lannister

Who is Cersei Lannister?

Cersei is the daughter of Tywin Lannister, the twin sister of Jaime and the sister of Tyrion, and at the start of the story she is queen to King Robert Baratheon. She is clever, proud and furious at a world that gives her brothers what it denies her, and much of what she does follows from that grievance. In Game of Thrones she is played by Lena Headey; in the novels she becomes a point-of-view character with A Feast for Crows, which lets readers watch her reasoning from inside.

Seen from outside she is the series' great schemer; seen from inside, in the fourth novel, she is something more uncomfortable, a ruler who believes she is the only person protecting her family while making every danger worse. The show keeps the menace and gives her moments of real grief, which is why she remains one of its most argued-about characters.

What drives her?

Her children, and the power that protecting them requires. Cersei has three, Joffrey, Myrcella and Tommen, and her ambition is almost always framed as their defence: every enemy she makes is someone who might threaten them, and every alliance is judged by what it does for them. The tragedy of the character is that her methods put them in more danger than any rival does.

Behind that sits an old fear. As a girl she was given a prophecy that has shadowed her ever since, part of which turns on a little brother, the valonqar of High Valyrian, and the novels let it colour how she sees Tyrion. A woman who believes her doom is already written makes choices that bring it closer, and readers of A Feast for Crows watch that loop tighten chapter by chapter.

What binds her to Jaime?

Cersei and her twin brother have been lovers since they were young, a secret that sits under the whole first part of the story and that both the books and the show treat as the hidden fault line of the Lannister family. Everything Cersei does to protect her position is also, quietly, an effort to keep that secret from coming out.

The bond outlasts almost everything else in her life. Jaime changes over the series and drifts away from her, and Cersei reads each step he takes toward a better self as a betrayal. The show ends with the two of them together, which gives the most tangled relationship in the series a final image that viewers still argue about.

How does she become queen in her own right?

By outliving every other route to power. Cersei holds power first as Robert's queen and then as the mother of the kings who follow him, and each of those routes closes as her children die. When the last of them is gone, at the end of the sixth season, she has herself crowned Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, the first time in the story that she holds power in her own name rather than someone else's.

It is both her triumph and her isolation. The crown she always wanted arrives only when she has nobody left to hold it for, and the show presents the coronation as cold rather than joyful. From then on she rules by fear and by alliance with whoever is useful, and the realm she governs is smaller, poorer and more frightened than the one she married into.

How does her story end?

In the show she dies with Jaime in the fifth episode of the final season, as the Red Keep falls during the destruction of King's Landing, and their bodies are later found in its ruins. The ending pairs her with the one person who had been with her from the beginning, which some viewers find fitting and others find too gentle for a character who did so much harm.

In the novels her story is unfinished as of the date this page was last checked. The books have been building a reckoning for her through the prophecy and through the enemies she makes in A Feast for Crows, so readers expect a different and perhaps darker end. Until the remaining volumes appear, the show's version is the only one there is.