Rosamund Pike’s Steamy Queer Romance in ‘Wheel of Time’ Has Us Melting

Rosamund Pike has been opening up about the queer romance fans have been clamoring over in The Wheel of Time series for Amazon, and we love everything she’s had to say.

The show’s decision to make Pike’s character, Moiraine, in a relationship with another woman (Siuan, the Amyrlin Seat, played by Sophie Okonedo) isn’t entirely canon when looking back to the original book series. A prequel hinted at it, but in a way that left things open to interpretation.

But showrunner Rafe Judkins made the queerness fully canon with an episode that left fans giddy — and seemingly, Pike, too. Here’s everything she’s said about her latest foray into playing a queer character so far:

1. She calls it a “forbidden love.”

Pike told TVLine that “the stakes of this forbidden love are massive,” and reiterated as much to Out, painting it as “a forbidden love, something that cannot be spoken.”

“The duty of the Amyrlin Seat is to have no favorites, to love no one, have no attachments, bar the throne,” she said. “It’s more treacherous, the risk of it getting out, than almost any secret you can imagine in their world….It’s a love that can never really exist because it can never be public. It can exist, but obviously is massively restricted by being hidden.”

Stories about queer women experiencing “forbidden love” are an old favorite, but as Daniel Reynolds points out, what sets this apart is that it isn’t based in homophobia, but rather the fact that Siuan is simply not allowed to be in love. It’s a world that seems to accept all sexualities and not differentiate between them, and yet Moiraine managed to fall for the one person she shouldn’t.

2. She wrote a letter to convince Okonedo to come on board.

“I definitely will confess to writing her an impassioned letter,” Pike told Out. “She’s an actress who can just take the throne.”

You have to appreciate an actress having such strong convictions as to who should play her love interest that she writes her a whole freaking letter in this day and age.

3. Some of the charged dialogue was “spur of the moment.”

Reynolds describes a scene between the two where “they have a steamy bedroom encounter, when Moiraine uses a phrase Siuan had used earlier, ‘on your knees,’ to comic and erotic effect.” And apparently, that bit was improvised between the actors.

The moment has already become a fan favorite, launching a queer heat wave across Twitter.

4. She’s excited about the queer representation.

“I think you don’t always realize, when you’re in a film or a TV show, what its cultural import is until much later. It can take an outside viewer to see it sometimes because you’re just inhabiting the world,” Pike said, and also called it “very exciting” once she realized she’s now playing a queer character at the heart of this high fantasy show.

Obviously this isn’t Pike’s first foray into playing a queer character, launching to icon status with I Care a Lot, but something just hits different about taking a long-beloved fantasy series and canonizing the queerness of a central figure on screen.

And if Pike wants to speak any further about how thrilled she is about doing just that, fans are more than ready to listen.