Game of Thrones star Carice van Houten confirms split with Oscar nominee Guy Pearce

Carice van Houten, best known for playing the Red Woman Melisandre on HBO’s Game of Thrones; and Guy Pearce, who was just nominated for the first Academy Award of his career for her turn in The Brutalist, have split up. Actually, they’ve been split up for quite a while, as van Houten revealed on her Instagram Stories.

“I don’t usually engage in discussions about my personal life, but because of a number of conclusions in the media last week regarding my relationship with Guy, I wanted to make something clear — he and I are great friends and love each other very much, but we haven’t been a ‘couple’ for years,” van Houten wrote. “I am however, very proud to say we are in a wonderful partnership raising the true love of our lives — our beautiful son and his hamster. The end.”

Pearce and van Houten started dating in 2015, a few months after Pearce split from his ex-wife Kate Mestitz, to whom he’d been married since 1997. Pearce and van Houten welcomed their son Monte in 2016. Rumors of a split started up the other week when Pearce gave an interview to The Guardian. “My ex-wife, Kate, was the greatest love of my life, but I’ve moved on from her now and the greatest love of my life is my child, Monte,” he said. There seemed to be someone missing from that sound bite, and now we know why. “I felt like I messed up my marriage. I don’t feel that way any more, but at the time I was devastated,” Pearce continued.

That said, as van Houten wrote, it sounds like the two of them have a solid relationship and do a good job of co-parenting their son, but they no longer have a love connection, if they ever did. As long as their family is happy, that’s all that matters.

As I mentioned, Pearce is up for his first-ever Oscar award for his turn as the brutal industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist, which won a Golden Globe Award for Best Picture. He lost the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor to Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain, but things might be different at the Academy Awards, which will air on March 2 on ABC and Hulu. Award shows are weird, and it’s possible something like this could shift his narrative ahead of the voting.

As for van Houten, she hasn’t appeared in any notable projects onscreen in a couple years, but she has a few movies and TV shows on the way. The Red Woman was never going to stay away for long.