Game of Thrones Star Carice Van Houten Calls Fans 'Ungrateful' for Negative Response to Season 8

WARNING: The following story contains spoilers from season 8 of Game of Thrones.

Game of Thrones star Carice van Houten — the actress who played Melisandre, a.k.a the Red Woman — is calling out some fans for being "ungrateful" with the final season, which aired last May.

Van Houten, speaking with Insider, said that she thinks the season eight criticism was actually "a sign of how good the show was."

"The fact that some people were so disappointed is because everything before that was so good," the 43-year-old actress told the outlet. "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."

Van Houten also dismissed the petition that called for a re-write of season eight, saying that it went "beyond fandom."

"That's extremism. That's scary," she said of the petition, which garnered nearly 2 million signatures. "Knowing the writers and knowing how f—— 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."

That product was certainly a successful one — the HBO series broke the record for most Emmy nominations in a single year in 2019 — and van Houten said that unlike some fans, she was happy with how the show's epic story wrapped up.

"I loved my arc. I did get the turn of the character. At some point, her whole world starts falling apart, and that was my favorite moment," van Houten explained of Melisandre, who dies after the Battle of Winterfell.

Van Houten called her character's demise a "beautiful farewell" in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last year.

"It's really satisfying to me. I'm really happy," she told the outlet at the time, adding that she "got goosebumps" when she read her final scene. "I thought it was a beautiful ending. I was very, very grateful."

The Dutch actress previously told PEOPLE that she was "star struck" by the actors she worked with on Game of Thrones.

"I felt like ‘Wow, I’m in a scene with Tyrion and Daenerys and all these people,' it was really great," she said in a 2017 interview, calling her experience in season seven a "roller coaster."

"It was an experience for me because I just gave birth six weeks before, so I was in a different country and I just had a baby and speaking Valyrian with different characters and wow, it was a bit of a roller coaster to be honest."

After her final episode aired last year, van Houten shared a pair of Instagram posts commemorating her role as Melisandre.

"A minute after my last shot (burning the trenches) and a minute before Dan started to speech which made me cry like a baby," she captioned one shot of her in costume on set. Alongside another behind-the-scenes photo, she wrote, "And there I go 😢😥😭."