Gemma Whelan: ‘Sex in Game of Thrones could be a frenzied mess’

She had one of the most notorious sex scenes in TV history. But the actor is now making waves as an upstanding cop in The Tower. She talks about intimacy coaches, on-set innuendo and cracking America

Gemma Whelan: “it would be almost insulting to be recognised from Game of Thrones”

Deadlines meant I saw ITV’s twisty police corruption drama The Tower as a rough cut, featuring on-screen notes about final editing perfections, computer-generated backgrounds, extra lines of dialogue – and the instruction: “Hide pregnancy bump.” 

This related to the increasing evidence of Freddie, now four weeks old, and sleeping between feeds in a pub garden near the London home of his mother, Gemma Whelan, who is amused to hear of this prenatal technology. “Wow!” she says. ‘“How are they going to do that? Paint it out? Or cut in a waistline from earlier?”