Lena Headey on the politics of White House plumbers

Lena Headey is frustrated with the current state of politics. “We just have to move on,” she tells POPSUGAR. “We need to see the meaning, not the money. I don’t know if that will ever change.”

Frustration with political powers in general is certainly something she Character from “White House Plumbers”, Dorothy Hunt, can relate, albeit for different reasons. Dorothy in real life was a former CIA agent who was married to E. Howard Hunt, one of the main promoters of the Watergate scandal. However, she Dorothy was never a full witness to the consequences of her husband’s crimes, as he died in a plane crash in 1972 as he was leaving Washington DC. Since her death, rumors about the level of her involvement in efforts to steal classified information from the Democratic Party have clouded Dorothy’s legacy. By the washington post, was identified as a “paymaster” who bought off the defendants to keep them quiet about the scandal, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Regardless, it’s clear that Dorothy definitely wasn’t completely out of the loop.

Dorothy de Headey is a resourceful housewife tasked with supporting her children alone, all while her husband goes on quests that usually end in disaster. At the beginning of the show, she is a mute presence. However, at the end of the season, Dorothy is free.

Playing Dorothy allowed Headey to experience the “joy of playing someone … who is completely underappreciated,” she says. “She’s much more calculated and plays better than anyone realizes, because she’s a woman and she’s in the background. Howard is in front of her with her ego, being brilliant, as he would say.”

Howard, played by Woody Harrelson, is portrayed as a clumsy and overconfident agent endowed with too much power. Originally a CIA agent like his wife, Howard’s ego grows when he is assigned the task of being a “White House plumber”, also known as the one responsible for identifying leaks of government information. Ultimately, his dedication to his work gets a little out of hand. Along with G. Gordon Liddy (played by Justin Theroux in this series), he becomes one of those responsible for the Watergate robberies that take down his beloved Nixon.

As Harrelson’s Howard plows his way through one absurd mission after another, Dorothy is always there in the background, managing her daughter’s ongoing mental health crises and putting on smiles over painful dinners with Liddy and his wife (who have a predilection for listening to Adolf Hitler’s speeches on his record player).

Dorothy’s arc is slow, and of course, Howard never notices his wife’s simmering anger until he’s out the door. “She’s constrained by the period in which she lives and the expectations of a married woman and a mother. But she Dorothy knows, she always knew, that she’s the smartest person in the room,” says Headey. “She spoke for many women [when I say] women tend to take their time as they go along, while men are affected by certain realizations. Especially when women say, ‘I’m done,’ [men] Go that?’ That’s what happens in Howard and Dorothy’s marriage. She’s like, ‘I’m done. I have worked hard. You have not seen it. I have kept this together. And Howard was left reeling from that revelation, but hopefully we’ve seen Dorothy’s evolution toward understanding the truth from her.”

Seeing the finished show for the first time made her realize how pronounced the contrast is between her character and the mostly male cast of the show. While she plays Dorothy with a certain dramatic gravitas, the men are in full comedy mode most of the time, and the effect is startling. “It really is kind of a pulsing bunch of dorky men, with some kind of bright, intelligent nugget of a woman in the middle who’s barely visible, but watches it all,” Headey says with a laugh.

Headey has played the role of an underappreciated woman who lurks behind the scenes of political machinations before. As the cruel and relentless Circei in “Game of Thrones,” she played someone willing to sacrifice almost anything to gain power.

Headey herself is also a mother who cares about politics, though unlike Circei, who simply wants power, or Dorothy, who operates firmly from within political systems, the real Headey seems to spend most of her time his time fighting the powers that be. She has been a strong advocate for refugees, working with the International Rescue Committee to draw attention to the global refugee crisis. The British actress has also been unapologetically political on her social media platforms, and after she was shamed by trolls for posting a video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019, she had a clear message. “I worry about the climate, I worry about my children and their future, I worry about my friends and their children and their future, I worry about the crisis that is happening around the world, the humanitarian crisis,” he said in a statement. video at the moment. “If that offends you, or you think actors have no place in the world to have an opinion, fuck you. Unfollow me and I won’t cry.”

Like Dorothy and Circei, Headey loves her children, but while the progeny of her fictional characters often find themselves too close to the explosive consequences, the real-life actress makes sure her children, 13 year old Wylie and 7 year old TeddyThey are not too exposed to the toxic wasteland that is the political sphere. “I find it like a circus of madness. It’s a dark path,” she says. “I get into certain issues and topics, but it’s not a political house in general. I talk to my kids about everything, because this world is crazy.”

It’s hard for anyone of any age, he says, to live in a world where political motivations are often rooted in greed. “It’s painful, right? It’s painful in the chest,” she says. “It hurts in your head when you wake up and think: It’s another day facing greed and stupidity, and we’re supposed to be in line and be faithful.”

Still, despite his doubts and fears, he is not going to stop fighting for a better world any time soon. “You have to advocate. You have to speak up,” she says. “I think that’s probably what I teach my kids, hopefully more than anything. You have to be on the good side.”

“White House Plumbers” is now streaming on HBO Max.