‘Game Of Thrones’ Actress Natalie Dormer Hooks Up With ‘Chicago Fire’ Star Taylor Kinney In ‘The Forest’
Game of Thrones actress Natalie Dormer is getting together with Chicago Fire star Taylor Kinney, proving Hollywood’s knack for pairing up the most unlikeliest of couples. While the two actors are both in their mid thirties and may not differ much socially, their professional interests couldn’t be more different. In fact, Kinney, fiancée to American Horror Story star Lady Gaga, has never seen Game of Thrones and wasn’t a big fan, until his appearance in The Forest offered him with the opportunity to check out the Game of Thrones series. All of it.
Chicago Fire‘s Taylor Kinney Did His Homework, Before Co-Starring With Natalie Dormer
The Forest, a horror film about a young woman in search of her sister (both siblings are played by Dormer) in a haunted forest, will be a first for Taylor. Although he has guest starred on the CW network’s The Vampire Diaries as Mason Lockwood, the Chicago Fire actor has never starred in a horror film and, as a new experience, it’s understandable that Kinney would want to find out all he could. As he began asking people what he might expect and inquired about co-star Natalie Dormer, many of his sources naturally mentioned Game of Thrones, which Taylor had never seen.
“So I binged-watched like the first three seasons and a couple of weeks of season four, down in my mom’s basement,” said The Forest actor with a laugh. “My mom kept yelling down, ‘Get off the couch!’ and I kept yelling back, ‘I can’t! I can’t. This is too good!'”
The Forest Allows Kinney To Explore New Traits In A Character Far Removed From Chicago Fire‘s Kelly Severide
The Forest casts Taylor as a mysterious new companion to Natalie Dormer’s character, as she ventures into a Japanese forest in search of her missing sister and Kinney says his character is unlike anything he’s previously played. He added that Jason Zada, who makes his feature film directorial debut with The Forest, was eager to hear the opinions of both Kinney and Dormer on their characters, which Taylor found refreshing.
As this is his first horror film, it seemed only natural to find out what Kinney thinks of the horror genre, though his newly discovered love of Game of Thrones might shed a clue to the answer. After all, the George R.R. Martin based series spills enough blood to qualify as horror.
“When I was a kid, it was a kind of rite of passage. Things like the old Stephen King ones. I loved Cujo, Pet Sematary, all the Amityville films, the first Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Those were my go-to films growing up, but then you’d need to watch an hour and a half of cartoons before you went to bed, so you didn’t freak out and have nightmares!”
Ms. Dormer, on the other hand, surprisingly says she’s not really a big fan of the genre. She says she has a sister who is a huge fan, but the Game of Thrones actress confesses to being too much of a coward. She does say that there have been a few she has liked.
In life, Ms. Dormer reveals a much braver nature, as she says that she visited Aokigahara Forest, which is also known locally as Suicide Forest and Sea of Trees. This is the basis of the film and some scenes were shot in the area, so Natalie wanted to visit it, but she adds that she followed the suggestions of the warning signs and strictly stayed on the paths.
Aokigahara Forest is popular for suicides, hence the local nickname. Between 2002 and 2003, a total number of 183 bodies were found in the forest. In 2010, more than 200 known attempts at suicide were made in the forest with the most common methods being hangings or drug overdoses. Of the 200 attempts, 54 were successful. Japan has since stopped publishing suicide statistics for Aokigahara Forest on the assumption that doing so has been encouraging suicides.
[Featured image by Rob Kim/Getty Images]
