Game of Thrones ended two years ago, but HBO is hoping that there’s still interest in Westeros and the people who live there. House of the Dragon, a show set nearly two centuries before Game of Thrones, is coming to the network next year, and star Olivia Cooke is feeling the pressure.
“It does help that the story is of a hundred years prior,” she recently told Collider. “We’re in the world of Game of Thrones, but you can also put yourself in a different head space as well and know that, for an actor, you don’t have to necessarily follow on from what anyone else is doing. But at the same time, yeah, it’s utterly bizarre, after the year or year and a half, of fucking 10 years that we’ve had, looking down and just being like, ‘What am I wearing? What am I doing? This is mad.'”
Cooke plays Alicent Hightower, the wife of King Viserys I Targaryen. When Viserys dies, she gets involved in a bloody power struggle for the Iron Throne; she wants her son Aegon to become the new king, but Viserys’ daughter from a previous marriage, Rhaenyra Targaryen, won’t let that happen without a fight.
Cooke can’t say too much about Alicent’s character, but if you’re read George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, you know she’s full of fascinating contradictions in the tradition of the best Game of Thrones characters. “She’s very complex and I think people are gonna want to see the worst in her,” Cooke said, cryptically.
"What’s amazing about Game of Thrones, like we saw in the past series, is that one season, you hate a character, and the next, you absolutely love them and will go to the ends of the earth for them. You just don’t know what you’re gonna get with these characters. They’re so well-written. Such is the human condition, you can do some horrendous things, but then you can also do some wonderful things as well. It’s very complex, and it’s not black and white at all."
That sounds like the kind of show I want to watch.
Olivia Cooke’s character on House of the Dragon is “complex”
“The crew is a hundred strong,” Cooke continued. “The artistry involved is mind blowing. The sets that have been created are fucking gorgeous, and the costumes. Down to the tiny prop that you hold in your hands, there’s just so much thought that goes into it and so much history as well. It’s amazing to work on a film, a TV show, or anything where everyone is just so passionate about it.
Like I said, we’ll have to wait a while before we can actually see House of the Dragon, but it sounds like it’ll be worth the wait. In the meantime, you can see Cooke act alongside John Boyega in the legal comedy-drama Naked Singularity, currently available on VOD.
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