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Sibel Kekilli as Shae


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I'm pretty surprised about this choice, but it is really a great choice. She will be Shae, much more than any other actress I could imagine.

Does anyone here know her work? If not, I really recommend you to learn German (or Turkish) and watch some of her movies. And I don't mean the porn stuff!

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I'm pretty surprised about this choice, but it is really a great choice. She will be Shae, much more than any other actress I could imagine.

Does anyone here know her work? If not, I really recommend you to learn German (or Turkey) and watch some of her movies. And I don't mean the porn stuff!

Completely agree, I would never have expected her to be in the mix for Shae (and doesn't really match what I pictured her as) but she's a perfect choice. Head-On (Gegen die Wand) is available on Netflix (with English subtitles!) It's a great movie and she is fantastic in it (as is the male lead). I was blown away when I saw it.

She has a unique look and presence on screen...grabs your attention and doesn't let go.

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I'm glad to see she's got a vote of confidence from you guys. The main photo on IMDB was a bit too Jennifer Love-Hewitt for me and I couldn't shake it since I don't know her work. And she's done porn? Shae indeed.

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I'm surprised no one has started complaining about it yet (not necessarily here), and not that it matters to me one bit, but I was very surprised to see her age. One, because she doesn't look her age, and two, I assumed they would look for someone younger.. but, as I said, she doesn't look her age so it really doesn't matter how old she is.

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I will say that the advice Ran gave in the other thread should be listened to; be very careful looking her up at work, there is some very, very NSFW stuff that comes up right near the top of searches.

As for her casting, I think she'll be fine. I trust the production people to find the best people for every part, and I'm not so attached to my mental pictures of characters that I'm upset if an actor doesn't fit it.

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You can be sure that HBO will pick a few interesting choices. But she has serious acclaim in Germany, so no surprise they thought she would be a great choice. Congrats to her. :)

It is a bit sad that something she did almost 10 years ago will always hang over her though.

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she has serious acclaim in Germany, so no surprise they thought she would be a great choice. Congrats to her. :)

She's had acclaim outside of Germany for her acting, too. She's won awards like a Special Jury Award at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. (Santa Barbara is a very important film fest.)

I'm going to have to see "Head-On," I'm totally unfamiliar with it.

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Well, yeah, she is actually 12 years older than Shae is supposed to be, but looks much younger (actually, she is the type of woman that still gets asked about her ID although she's already in her late twenties).

About the mental pictures of Shae:

I actually remember no line in the books describing Shae as the womanly type (big breasted etc.), rather the contrary - when Tyrion first meets her, he does not believe that she is already 18, which is a huge sign that her charms are more of the Lolita-girl type (which is, of course, also the kind of woman Tyrion will fall for, due to the whole Tysha thing). Also, her confession about Tyrion's crimes during the trial is supposed to make every man seeing it wanting to protect her. She is really going to pull this off!

If you want to see her in a role resembling Shae's try the German TV two-parter Gier by Dieter Wedel (if you can somehow find it, I doubt that there is an international version available). The story is about a deceitful broker who is able to get rich and not-so-rich people of Hamburg into giving him there money, thus ruining themselves. Sibel plays an unemployed actress which is hired by said broker to 'entertain' motivate his victims to keep faith in him. She is there as drawn to wealth and status as Shae is in the series; and proofs also the same kind of one-sided insight in the machinations of power as Shae does (when she recognizes Varys, for example).

Another good piece is 'Die Fremde', which deals with the conflicts within the Turkish community within Germany. She is a young girl forced into a marriage in Turkey; and when she decides to leave her husband and returns to Germany the relationship with her family falls apart.

She herself suffered a similar fate when the 'Bild Zeitung' revealed her porn career to the public shortly after 'Gegen die Wand' had won a 'Goldenen Bär'; subsequently her whole family broke off contact with her.

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It is a bit sad that something she did almost 10 years ago will always hang over her though.

well, it is what it is. It's not some naughty school girls pics. I checked out her previous work and it's full-on hard core. But hey, there have been a few former porn stars who have crossed over to main-stream acting. HBO obviously know about it so it's no big deal.

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I'm going to have to see "Head-On," I'm totally unfamiliar with it.

Isn't that Vincent Chase's movie?

Seriously though, I am always amazed that everyone who's been cast (besides the newcomers) seems to be fairly well-known to quite a few people here. Outside of Dinklage and Bean, I might go "oh wasn't he/she in X?" for a couple cast members, but besides that I had no idea who anyone was.

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She was no 'porn star'. Nobody knew that she had starred in hardcore stuff, until it was made public by Germany's greatest (boulevard) newspaper. Essentially, the porn movies she starred in became only successful after people knew that this was the case (a real 'porn star' stars only in successful porn movies, I assume).

She therefore is not porn actress who finally was able to leave this business behind her to become a real actress, but a woman who did a lot of stuff (including porn) to survive, and then became an actress pretty much out of the blue. Getting asked at a mall is not exactly career planning, and winning the lead role out of over 200 competitors is not easy.

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I am insanely excited about this casting, I''ve loved her performance in everything I've ever seen her in (albeit in translation, since I don't speak German or Turkish). I didn't think there'd be any surprise casting choices this awesome this late in the game for the 1st season.

Personally, I'm glad they aged Shae up a little, namely because Dinklage is a good 10+ years older then Tyrion and presumably they'll still play the Sansa marriage as a source of sexual frustration. I think that if everyone Tyrion is attracted to is 20+ years younger than him - not the case in the books - it's not going to read "Tyrion is attracted to innocence and wants to recapture his childhood love affair" it's going to read "Tyrion is a pedophile" esp in a visual medium like television.

I didn't think it was possible for me to be more excited for the Tyrion parts of the show, but I definitely am now.

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She was no 'porn star'. Nobody knew that she had starred in hardcore stuff, until it was made public by Germany's greatest (boulevard) newspaper. Essentially, the porn movies she starred in became only successful after people knew that this was the case (a real 'porn star' stars only in successful porn movies, I assume).

She therefore is not porn actress who finally was able to leave this business behind her to become a real actress, but a woman who did a lot of stuff (including porn) to survive, and then became an actress pretty much out of the blue. Getting asked at a mall is not exactly career planning, and winning the lead role out of over 200 competitors is not easy.

:rolleyes: Okay...porn actress? Amature porn participant? In video clips where people have sex?

I have no issues with anyone who has done porn. But as i said before, it is what it is. :dunno:

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Considering that Sasha Grey (and there's no doubt with her I'd say, despite the Soderberg movie) is playing a recurring character in the second half of Entourage this season; I think HBO really doesn't care what people have done in their past.

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Considering that Sasha Grey (and there's no doubt with her I'd say, despite the Soderberg movie) is playing a recurring character in the second half of Entourage this season; I think HBO really doesn't care what people have done in their past.

Yup. :) At best it will raise more interest in the show, which is never a bad thing.

And given Dinklage's age, I agree that it is no surprise that the Shae actress is also older.

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She was no 'porn star'. Nobody knew that she had starred in hardcore stuff, until it was made public by Germany's greatest (boulevard) newspaper. Essentially, the porn movies she starred in became only successful after people knew that this was the case (a real 'porn star' stars only in successful porn movies, I assume).

Well, this is sort of an issue with definitions. "Star" sounds like it's someone who is successful, and when I first saw someone refer to Sibel as a "porn star" at Winter-is-Coming, I wondered whether that was accurate. But then I started to think about how the term is used, and it usually just refers to someone who is in porn, is my feeling. If you were an extra in some porn movie, and didn't actually have sex on camera, then you're probably not a porn star. But if you've had onscreen intercourse in any kind of professionally made for sale porn movie, then you are arguably a porn star. If you and somebody recorded yourselves having sex for your own personal viewing, then it came to be sold without your permission, you had a sex tape, but are not really a porn star (actually, even if they sold it with your permission, it probably amounts to the same thing). Anyway, despite not having seen any of her movies, my determination is porn star probably applies. Now, if somebody were to call her a "porn superstar," that's probably out of bounds.

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Yeah, if everyone who stars in a porn movie is considered a 'porn star', then she is a porn star, too. If not, she is just a porn actress. I considered her being the latter. But technically she became somewhat of a 'porn star' later on, when the public learned about her involvement in the business, as this boosted the sale of her movies tremendously.

I just tried to make it clear that she was never a porn star of the sort that appears everywhere on screen in this capability as porn star to exploit her fame commercially, or really was able to become a successful actress after she had been a successful porn star. It is unlikely that she had become an actress if the public (or at least movie industry) had known her as porn star.

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