Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer secretly gave birth to her first child

The actress and her partner David Oakes welcomed a baby girl in January

Game of Thrones’ Natalie Dormer secretly gave birth to her first child 1

Natalie Dormer welcomed a baby girl three months ago.

The 39-year-old British actress, who is best known for her role as Margaery Tyrell on HBO’s Game of Thrones, revealed during the latest episode of That’s After Life! podcast that she gave birth to her first child with partner David Oakes in January.

“It’s the perfect thing to do during a pandemic – get pregnant, have a baby,” Dormer told the podcast hosts Dame Esther Rantzen and Adrian Mills. “I feel like I’m probably being a bit of a cliche. [But] she’ll probably be sitting in a bar in 30 years’ time … going, ‘Yeah, I’m a COVID baby!’ I think there’s going to be lots of COVID babies cause what else could people do?”

While Dormer didn’t share any personal details about her daughter, including her name and her exact birth date, the actress said that her firstborn is an “absolute joy.”

Dormer, however, admitted that she’s been lacking sleep for the past three months. “I’m never going to complain about shooting hours ever again because sleep deprivation is something else,” she said. “Sleep has always been quite important to me, that’s the only downside [of having a kid]. But you know, nature is so clever – the hormones kick in.”

Dormer, who most recently appeared on Showtime’s Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, also shared that even though she’s just three months into motherhood, the arrival of her daughter has already changed how she views life in a big way.

“You hear people say, ‘Your whole perspective on life will change, and your whole set of value systems will alter,’ and you sort of roll your eyes … and then you have one [a baby] and you go, ‘Oh, wow!’ It really does completely alter the lens,” the actress said.

While Dormer plans to continue her acting job while raising her child, she knows that returning to work will be “very difficult,” as she doesn’t want her career to “warp” her baby girl’s experience.

“People in the industry that I’m in do lean on nannies and they do that for a reason, so that they can take children with them,” The Tudors alum explained. “But I mean, for me, this is the perfect time to go back to the stage, because then I could be with her all day. But with COVID, who knows when that will happen? I really feel for our theatres around the country, there’s hard times.”

Dormer met Oakes, 37, while they were working together on Venus in Fur at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2017. The next year, she broke up with her fiancé Anthony Byrne after being together for 11 years.

The relationship between Dormer and Byrne began to crumble while they were working on the 2018 movie In Darkness, which they both co-wrote. “Couples say terrible things to each other that you would never say to your best friend,” Dormer said of the 45-year-old director in an interview with You Magazine (via Us Weekly) in July 2018. “We learned very quickly that we couldn’t write in the same room. Doors got slammed at various points and I wouldn’t necessarily rush into writing with Anthony again, but I have huge respect for him.”

Byrne mentioned similar things to The Hollywood Reporter in the same year. “Because we didn’t have an office or anything, we were in our own home writing, and then it would all kick off because we would disagree about something fundamentally or I would be a pain in the arse.”

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