Emily Carey praises “amazing” intimacy coordinator on House of the Dragon

This past Sunday’s new episode of House of the Dragon featured several sex scenes, including one between Alicent Hightower and her husband, King Viserys I Targaryen. Alicent is much younger than the king, and is essentially summoned to his room in the dead of night for sex. She obeys purely out of a sense of obligation and doesn’t seem to enjoy it at all; it was uncomfortable to watch.

Unsurprisingly, Emily Carey, who plays Alicent, was nervous about playing it. “I think I was still 17 when I started this job, I was 18 by the time we started shooting but there was a few months of me in this role as a 17-year-old,” she told Newsweek. “I’ve never seen Game of Thrones before, and so in the pre-production period I sat down to try and watch [it] and of course the first season, even just the first episode of Thrones, there’s a lot of violence upon women. There’s a lot of violent sex and it made me nervous. I was like, ‘Oh God, what am I gonna have to do in this show?'”

It’s true that Game of Thrones had a reputation for shameless titillation, particularly in its earlier years, and for depictions of violence against women. A lot has changed in Hollywood since the original show premiered in 2011, and it sounds like House of the Dragon is approaching intimate scenes with a lot of nuance and care. “When we got to the rehearsal room, regardless of who was in which scenes, there was an open dialogue about, ‘Look, this is how we’re approaching the show. This is how it’s going to be different from the original. This is what we want to talk about. This is what we want to put out. This is how we want the viewers to view the women in our show,'” Carey said.

"I think that open conversation is so important, it made us all feel incredibly secure and safe in the hands of [showrunners] Ryan [Condal] and Miguel [Sapochnik].Certainly, there were a lot of women behind the scenes, we had an amazing team, we had, of course, female directors, I worked with the amazing Clare Kilner who was fierce, and lots of women producing this show as well, and Sarah, one of our writers, amongst many others in the writers room, I’m sure.It was an amazing thing, and it was empowering being on that set as a young girl and being treated the same as all of these very established men. It was great, I think they approached this in the best way they could have done."

Kilner directed the most recent episode, which had several sex scenes. For all of them, an “amazing” intimacy coordinator was on hand. “Again, still being 17, the first scene that I read from the show was my sex scene and my intimacy scenes, that includes the scene where I’m bathing the king—anything that felt intimate was considered an intimacy scene, which I thought was great,” Carey said. “But, it scared me, because at that point I still hadn’t met [Viserys Targaryen actor Paddy Considine], I didn’t know how much of a joy he was and how easy he was going to make [the scene], and all I saw was, you know, a 47-year-old man and me, I was a bit concerned.”

"And having that outlet of the intimacy coordinator, to be able to talk everything through and not be shunned, or not feel awkward, or not feel like ‘Oh, this isn’t your job. I don’t want to make you feel uncomfortable but can I ask you…’ it was never any of that, it was just that open dialogue.In the rehearsal room she was a massive help and on set she was a massive help. Yeah, it was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be."

A while back, Game of Thrones veteran Sean Bean said he wasn’t a fan of intimacy coordinators, worried that the “natural way lovers behave would be ruined by someone bringing it right down to a technical exercise.” Hearing stories like Carey’s makes clear how important and helpful they are, especially in the wake of the #MeToo era where the culture of sexual abuse in Hollywood was put in the spotlight.

Emily Carey on the “heartbreaking” decay of Alicent and Rhaenyra’s freindship

Of course, Carey has a lot of other kinds of scenes to play. A focal point of the first several episodes has been Alicent’s deteriorating relationship with her friend Rhaenrya Targaryen, whom her father the king — Alicent’s husband — has named heir to the Iron Throne. Some at court would prefer that Alicent’s newborn son be heir instead. It’s complicated.

“I think the way they’ve approached this friendship in the show, first of all, is very different from the book [Fire and Blood, by George R. R. Martin],” Carey said. “I, of course, read the book for context, and was surprised to see that there wasn’t a huge amount of in-depth [information], it didn’t go in depth as such when it came to their friendship, and there was actually quite a big age gap between the two girls in the book.”

"I think having them so incredibly close is what makes the demise of the friendship so heart-breaking, and there’s a lot more at stake, if that makes sense. Of course, there’s always things at stake when it comes to the throne, but we’re talking emotions, we’re talking true, raw emotions from two young women."

It’s true that House of the Dragon has fleshed out the relationship between Rhaenrya and Alicent a lot; in Martin’s book, they’re basically acquaintances who get along well until Alicent starts having kids with the king, at which point she starts pushing for her first-born son Aegon to succeed his father. On the show, there’s a lot more emotional complexity.

“It was a lot of fun playing around with this friendship and I adore Milly [Alcock, who plays a young Rhaenyra] off-screen and so everything came very organically on-screen,” Carey said. “It’s heart-breaking to watch it break down, or at least it should be, they both make questionable choices at times but, the thing is, a lot of the time the choices are made to look like it’s made by them but it’s never really their choice, their lives are dictated by their fathers and the men around them. Which is what makes it so difficult to watch, because neither one of them are in control at all throughout the entire journey, whether they’re incredibly close or when it starts to break down.”

Expect a “spark” to grow in Alicent Hightower as House of the Dragon continues

Alicent’s father Otto Hightower is definitely leaning hard on her to push for Aegon’s claim over Rhaenyra’s, however little Alicent wants to do that. “I think it was interesting, the dynamic between Otto and Alicent was one of the most interesting for me to explore as an actor, just because I don’t have a relationship with my own father and so I found it difficult at first to try and delve into that, just because it’s not a normal father-daughter relationship,” Carey said. “Alicent is kind of a pawn in his big game, but one of the first things that Miguel said to me was that she’s very acutely aware of the game of thrones, and she’s aware of the world that she’s in and where she sits in that world.”

"And I think she starts to become aware of the fact that she doesn’t have a choice and that she is a pawn in this big game, and she just has to sit with it, I don’t think she ever anticipated that Otto would be the one manipulating that."

It looks like she’s about to cotton on, if she hasn’t already. The trailer for this upcoming Sunday’s new episode makes it look like Alicent is reaching a point of no return:

Alicent has mostly been following her father’s order up to this point, although she has broken away at times, whether it’s refusing to lean on her husband to name Aegon heir or telling Rhaenyra about accusations coming her way. Expect her to continue to forge her own path as she gets older. “I think she finds herself in that position and then she wants it, I don’t think she ever wanted it from the get go,” Carey said. “I think it was ‘right, I’m here. Now I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do,’ and I think she has a huge amount of ambition and determination.”

"I think she’s a very emotional person. I think Alicent has a huge heart, which sometimes will cause her to act villainous, because she’s fighting for the people that she loves dearly, which, obviously, as I read the book I know what’s to come vaguely.We know that she fights for her children, eventually, the Alicent that I play doesn’t really get there. I mean, we see that spark, there’s definitely a spark, but we don’t see that until episodes four or five, I’d say."

Emily Carey: The time jumps on House of the Dragon are “done well”

When Carey says that “the Alicent I play doesn’t really get there,” she’s referring to the fact that she’s only in the show for one more episode. After that, we’ll get a time jump, and Olivia Cooke will play an adult Alicent Hightower.

House of the Dragon has made liberal use of time jumps in this first season. “It moves fast, it definitely moves fast and I think reading the scripts I was certainly like, ‘how is this going to work?'” Carey said. “How are they going to make me look 14 at 9 a.m. and then we go through a scene after lunch, and suddenly I’m 18 and I’m pregnant? And then as soon as we started doing the costume fittings and that kind of thing, [working with our] genius team behind the show, everything started to fall into place.”

"As an actor, I was kind of scared coming onto it, [I was] not sure how I was going to approach it and having to jump between [time periods], and the shoot was so long as well, it was like 9-10 months and so that’s a long time to have to jump back and forth between scenes, and try and remember what you’re doing and where you’re going. But, I think it reads really well on screen and I think it was all needed. I think every time skip needed to be there and the show would be completely different if they weren’t there."

I was a little nervous about the show jerking forward in time so often, but I think it’s been very easy to follow, and based on how much buzz the series has generated, it seems other people agree with me. “I think showing such a broad span of someone’s life in such a short period of time is an amazing thing to do on screen,” Carey said. “It’s ambitious, and it doesn’t always pay off [on TV] but I think as a viewer it’s so cool to watch when it’s done well, and I hope everyone agrees with me when I say that in the show it was done well.”

That said, the real test will come when the older actors replace the younger ones. But we still have one more episode with the cast we know before that happens. See you Sunday!

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