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Former Game Of Thrones star Carice van Houten has hit back at the backlash the show’s divisive finale received.

It was well-documented that the show’s final series, which concluded around this time last year, wasn’t especially pleasing to a lot of fans, with the events of the last episode proving especially controversial.

Some disgruntled fans even set up a petition calling for the last season to be rewritten and reshot, which Carice – who played Melisandre in the hit show – has admitted she was less than impressed by.

In an interview with Insider, she insisted she was a big fan of the finale, explaining: “I loved the ending. I loved the randomness of just picking a king.

“That’s why I loved the first season, the guy who actually was king [Robert Baratheon], didn’t want to be king, so we already got a lesson in the beginning: ‘Why are you striving for that sort of power when, obviously, it doesn’t make you happy?’”

Addressing the backlash, Carice continued: “The fact that some people were so disappointed is because everything before that was so good.

“So it feels a bit ungrateful. You’ve had such great times and then yeah, you’re going to be disappointed because it’s not going to go exactly how you anticipated. Of course, you’re going to have all sorts of criticisms and I just thought it was a sign of how good the show was.

“People sometimes take it too far and get too personal, but I can’t take that seriously… It just always amazes me how people can go behind their computer and just type ‘die bitch die,’ I’m fascinated by that human psyche.” 

And of the infamous petition, she added: “That’s beyond fandom. That’s extremism. That’s scary. Knowing the writers and knowing how fucking great they are, they don’t deserve that.

“I think they are probably cool enough to deal with that but still, they are human beings, they are trying to make a good product.”

Carice recently spoke about how the Me Too movement led her to question the many nude scenes depicted in the early seasons of Game Of Thrones, including those she appeared in herself.

She said: “In retrospect, I thought, ‘Why did that scene have to be nude? Why was that normal?’.

“I did question things, and it was not so much that I was blaming anyone, but that’s just how we evolved and just how the movement affected me.”