For years now, rumors have swirled that two “Game of Thrones” stars — Lena Headey, who played Cersei Lannister, and Jerome Flynn, who played Bronn — wouldn’t appear together on-screen after a terrible breakup in real life. So is it true?
It’s not, according to Flynn himself. During a 2019 appearance at Con of Thrones in Nashville, Flynn addressed the rumors and said that, contrary to what he’d heard, the two were on fine terms. “We were actually in the same scene together, and the last time I saw Lena we were speaking, so I wouldn’t believe everything you read, and like I said, [the media] can get pretty desperate for stories,” Flynn said before praising Headey: “Lena is a wonderful person and a wonderful actress. I think the world of her.”
So why did these rumors surface in the first place? During the season 7 finale of “Game of Thrones,” titled “The Dragon and the Wolf,” warring factions meet on Cersei’s home turf of King’s Landing … and Bronn somewhat conspicuously exits the scene alongside squire Podrick Payne (Daniel Portman). In 2019, the British tabloid The Sun spread (apparently baseless) rumors about friction, claiming, “Lena and Jerome have not filmed together due to a bad break-up. They kept the full extent of it secret but it was a very turbulent relationship and it has been very awkward on set. Lena has opened up to her trusted friends. She appears to have a genuine hate towards him.” As far as Flynn is concerned, he has no idea what any of these reports are talking about.
Lena Headey and Jerome Flynn’s characters really never needed to appear onscreen together
To be fair, even if there was some sort of personal problem between the two, there wasn’t usually a solid reason to put Jerome Flynn and Lena Headey on set together. Both characters are introduced in the first season but are in radically different situations. Flynn’s Bronn is a humble sellsword who teams up with Cersei’s younger brother Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), whom Cersei despises, when “The Imp” finds himself imprisoned in the Eyrie. Cersei, meanwhile, is the wife of King Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), and spends a majority of her time in King’s Landing.
The natural distance between the characters largely remains throughout the show. Bronn gets involved with a whole host of storylines involving Cersei’s brothers — more on that in a moment — and after King Robert dies, Cersei installs her secret bastard son Joffrey (Jack Gleeson), who is a product of incest between the queen and her twin brother Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), on the Iron Throne and essentially rules through him. That is the really interesting thing about these two characters, though: Bronn and Cersei rarely have a good reason to interact, but Bronn’s storylines often circle Cersei’s because he’s basically always hanging out with one of her two brothers.
Interestingly, Jerome Flynn’s storylines on Game of Thrones were often Cersei-adjacent
I already mentioned that Bronn begins the show defending Tyrion in a trial by combat, but after Jaime loses his sword hand in the show’s third season, he ends up saddled with Bronn for, more or less, the rest of the series. Tyrion asks Bronn, a talented fighter, to help Jaime learn to fight with his left hand, and the two end up going to Dorne for a subplot that produces seriously diminishing returns in season 4. Bronn basically sticks by Jaime’s side from that point on, though, even fighting with him against Daenerys Targaryen’s (Emilia Clarke) massive dragons when the would-be queen destroys a loot train filled with Lannister gold as Jaime and Bronn attempt to escort it throughout Westeros in season 7. Bronn, a man who always talks about how easily he can be bought and sold, ends up forsaking a big sack of gold to tackle Jaime into the water to avoid a blast of dragon fire, saving the Kingslayer’s life.
The last season of “Game of Thrones” is, to put it bluntly, weird and bad — especially when Bronn shows up with a crossbow and tells Tyrion and Jaime that Cersei has offered him a bounty to kill either of them, which sort of undoes the whole “saving Jaime’s life thing” from just a few episodes prior. It is funny that Cersei and Bronn’s storylines both often revolve around Jaime, and in the end, the characters get different unsatisfying endings (Bronn, who doesn’t know what a loan is, becomes the realm’s Master of Coin; Jaime and Cersei die under a pile of easily avoidable rocks).
