Aeryn Walker: The Feminist Porn Star in Game of Thrones

Meet Aeryn Walker, the feminist Aussie porn star in Game of Thrones

AERYN Walker calls herself a “feminist” porn star. 

As a young student who was fed up with the general awfulness of mainstream pornography, Ms Walker decided to create her own form of adult entertainment.

“Porn is all kind of made for dudes and the storylines are terrible,” Ms Walker tells news.com.au.

“I do a lot of role-playing in my regular life. I thought, screw it, I’ll just make it myself!”

Now, incredibly, that decision has scored the 25-year-old a role in Game of Thrones. How?

“I knew one of the girls from the show. She used to live in Melbourne, and she moved overseas,” Ms Walker says.

That woman’s name is Maisie Dee. She’s another porn star, who appeared in three Game of Thrones episodes during the show’s second season.

“I went over to Sweden for a holiday, and happened to stop by Amsterdam for a week, working in porn. One day I bumped into her on the street,” Ms Walker says.

She (half-jokingly) told Ms Dee about her desire to get a role in Game of Thrones, and the pair talked more at work that evening.

“After that I went to Sweden,” she says. “Then, about a month later, I got an email from Maisie, saying they were casting for a few roles and I would be suitable for two of them.”

Space wasn’t exactly plentiful, so Ms Walker had to film her two-part demo reel in a friend’s bathroom.

“I had to act out the first bit of the scene I’m in,” she says. “The second part was a pretty long video of me crying. They described in pretty graphic detail how I should cry.”

It was a shot in the dark. But in August of last year, “after jumping through a bunch of hoops,” she was offered the job.

For obvious reasons, Ms Walker can’t talk about her part in the show until her episode airs. She actually doesn’t know when that will be.

“I know where in the timeline it fits,” she says. “But not the exact episode.”

However, she could tell us a little bit about her time on set in Ireland.

“They took really good care of us. The set was amazing. Watching some of the actors actually act was crazy.”

She even got to meet Kit Harington, the rather popular young man who plays Jon Snow.

“It was really cool,” Ms Walker says. “I was waiting to get my makeup done. Then he came out of his makeup trailer and asked if he could borrow my lighter.

“We just chatted about the books and stuff. It was just a regular, friendly chat. Genuinely nice guy.”

Speaking of the books, Ms Walker wasn’t familiar with George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, upon which Game of Thrones is based, until the TV show was about to air for the first time.
“I hadn’t read any of the books until about two months before the TV show started. Then my boyfriend gave me the books,” she says. “By the time the first season had ended, I had read five of them.”

She's certainly a fast reader. Ms Walker is about as enthusiastic a Game of Thrones fan as you’ll find, even though she got started late.

Conversely, some of the show’s biggest fans will already be familiar with Ms Walker’s work when she appears on HBO. As an amateur porn star, she has a particular talent for cosplay, and frequently dresses up in costumes inspired by video games and other parts of geek culture.

“I prefer amateur stuff, like actual, real amateur stuff,” she says. “I really don’t like the American, plastic fantastic model of doing things.

“To have that as a default is ridiculous. People don’t look like that, and people don’t have sex like that.”

Ms Walker says mainstream pornography is “pretty racist and sexist,” but it doesn’t need to be.

“I think it’s pretty scary for a lot of women to see them doing these crazy things. And that’s sad,” she says.

“Porn is a fantasy. It’s not an educational tool. But I think there should be a basis in reality.

“I actually think that my stuff is ethical, and the majority of my fan base is female, which is kind of uncommon.”

Despite her role in one of television’s most popular shows, Ms Walker says she doesn’t want to become a full-time actor.

“Probably not as a career, but I would really be interested in maybe some small roles,” she says. “I would love to be in sci-fi shows. I really like science-fiction.”

That wouldn’t be the first fantasy Ms Walker has fulfilled.