In an interview with The Daily Beast, Jack Gleeson, who plays the creepy and cruel King Joffrey in Game of Thrones, has spoken out about the role of women in the show. The actor, who kills a naked prostitute with a crossbow in one of the show’s scenes, said, “It’s a tricky thing when you are representing misogyny in that way because I wouldn’t say the show ever implicitly condones misogyny or any kind of violence towards women. But, perhaps, it’s still unfair or unjust to represent it even if the gloss on the representation is a negative one.”
The 23-year-old actor said that whilst he could never put himself in the place of an abused woman, “Sometimes you have to represent awful things happening onscreen even if they’re for entertainment because you have to expose the brutality of them, because the chances are you’re not going to see that anywhere.” He also says that it comes down to the treatment you give a story, explaining, “Are you in some way making it cool, or are you making it into an entertainment product, and is that wrong? Or are you doing it in order to expose the problem of sexual assault?”
Gleeson, who’s taken time out of big studio acting for the time being, also agreed that there should be more male nudity on the show, to even out all that female flesh, “not just objectify women but also objectify the beauty of the male genitalia! We’re all objects together.”