Rose Leslie (born Rose Eleanor Arbuthnot-Leslie; 9 February 1987) is a Scottish actress. She's perhaps best known for her portrayals of Gwen Dawson in the first series of Downton Abbey, Ygritte in Game of Thrones, and Maia Rindell in The Good Fight. She is of Scottish nobility and one of the many descendants of Charles II. (Another is her Thrones love interest Kit Harington, who she married in June 2018; they have a son born in February 2021.)
Filmography on TV Tropes:
- 2010, 2015: Downton Abbey as Gwen Dawson
- 2011: Case Histories as Laura Wyre
- 2012: Vera as Lena Holgate
- 2012–14: Game of Thrones as Ygritte
- 2014: Utopia as Young Milner
- 2014: Honeymoon as Bea
- 2015: The Last Witch Hunter as Chloe
- 2015: Luther as Emma Lane
- 2016: Morgan as Dr. Amy Menser
- 2016: Revolting Rhymes as Red Riding Hood
- 2017: ECHO as En
- 2017–19: The Good Fight as Maia Rindell
- 2021: Vigil as DS Kirsten Longacre
- 2022: Death on the Nile as Louise Bourget
- 2022: The Time Traveler's Wife as Clare Abshire
Tropes relating to her performances:
- I Am Very British: Inverted. Her breakout roles gave her strong regional British accents (e.g. Gwen's clear Yorkshire and Ygritte's accent, which is somewhere in the Scottish Borders/far North of England area). However, her actual speaking accent is RP (see, e.g., this interview
with Seth Meyers), even though she was born and raised in Aberdeenshire. This is less surprising when you realise that most of the traditional Scottish nobility (of which she is emphatically a member) speak RP as a class marker (they pick it up from their family and from school). - Irony as She Is Cast: In both her breakout roles, as Gwen Dawson in Downton Abbey and Ygritte in Game of Thrones she plays characters at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (or in Ygritte's case outside the ladder entirely) despite the fact that in real life she is as blue-blooded an aristocrat as they come.
- Romance on the Set: She and Kit Harington played onscreen love interests, Ygritte and Jon Snow respectively, on Game of Thrones and subsequently fell in love in real life; they eventually married in 2018.
- What Could Have Been: She was initially cast in the lead role of The Turning, an adaptation of the The Turn of the Screw (which at this stage was titled Haunted), but ending up dropping out of the project and was later replaced by Mackenzie Davis.
