The new Alicent Hightower is “bittered and twisted” by her experiences

For the first five episodes of House of the Dragon, Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower were played by Milly Alcock and Emily Carey respectively. The next episode will take place 10 years after the last. The two characters have grown up, grown apart, and are now played by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke.

It’s going to be interesting seeing how people to the new actors, because in some ways the characters feel radically different from what we’re used to. Alicent especially doesn’t feel like the timid girl we knew. She’s much more strident and cutthroat, especially when it comes to protecting what she sees as the rights of her eldest son Aegon to the Iron Throne.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Cooke said that House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik told her that Alicent is a little like “a woman for Trump,” aka someone who advocated against their own interests in order to uphold a patriarchal system. “I just didn’t want to give them any more mental real estate than they already had,” Cooke said of that particular note. “So I tried to find a different route into her, but I could see what they were saying with this complete indoctrination and denial of her own autonomy and rights. I just couldn’t be asked to go down that road.”

Instead, Cooke looked for a “humanitarian hook” with Alicent, reasoning that after being raised by her father Otto as “this perfect vessel for his ascension to power,” years alone at court had left her “bittered and twisted.” You’ll see what she’s talking about this Sunday. “You’re seeing her struggle with her womanhood and the power that she does have to play that is completely separate from her husband or her father or even her children. And also just moralistically where she stands when she isn’t listening to her father anymore.”

"Alicent has been completely bred to breed, and to breed powerful men. That’s her only function in this life. She can tell herself that she’s going to sway and nurture and persuade in a very womanly, feminine way, but it’s all f—ing bull—-. Unless you’re fighting the men, you’ll never be heard. It’s learning to live within this straightjacket of oppression. How do I move inch by inch every single day to loosen the straps?"

Meanwhile, Alicent sees Rhaenrya getting away with some obvious shenanigans — again, watch the episode to find out — and feels cheated. “Rhaenyra can just get away with anything, and it’s so fine. The king turns a complete blind eye, whereas Alicent has always had to walk this tightrope for her whole entire life,” Cooke said. “Just the injustice of it that she feels, until things happen and she realizes that none of it f—ing matters. She looks around her family, and they’re all f—ed up. She’s like, ‘I’ve been so perfect all my life. I haven’t taken a step wrong, and it doesn’t f—ing matter.’ I think what we see in her evolution is this complete existential crisis.”

It’s made worse because Rhaenyra and Alicent used to be friends, as we saw earlier in the series. Alicent may still not be over their breakup. “I think it’s the first proper heartbreak, and the first only heartbreak that [Alicent’s] had, because it was such a pure love,” Cooke said. “A lot of us have those first influential friendships that become severed at a certain point, and it’s just harrowing because there is a bit of you that breaks off. There’s so much that you don’t get closure over like you would with a romantic relationship. [Rhaenyra] was her only friend, and she’s so lonely. She’s got all these men around her that just want a piece of her, or want to use her in a specific way, but no one actually has her best interest. It’s just a really lonely existence.”

"She does some f—ing despicable stuff,. But then you’ve got to think, she’s trying to protect her son. She’s trying to uphold the patriarchy. She’s trying to uphold the legitimacy of the crown. All these things that she feels are so much bigger than she is. I think that’s why when she can’t control that, she turns to faith more as some sort of tangible element of control, because she doesn’t have any in her life whatsoever."

It all starts on Sunday.

Rhaenyra and Viserys “spend a lot of time at an impasse” on House of the Dragon

Meanwhile, Rhaenyra is still trying to push her claim as the heir to the Iron Throne, even as opposition grows in Alicent’s camp, and this when people were already skeptical of the idea of a woman becoming the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. “I think to say she’s gender-questioning would be too extreme because the language doesn’t exist,” D’Arcy said. “But I think she is someone who’s pushing at the edges of womanhood and has a really decisive, interrogative eye for how gender affects power, affects how one may occupy space, affects even the right to construct one’s life. Basically, the interaction or the continued consolidation of male power and patriarchy is probably what really excited me about the script when I first read it.”

"This character, as a result of patriarchal constraints, essentially doesn’t have power. They have privilege, but they don’t have power. It’s one thing to put two female characters in the center of a series like this, but it’s another when they are positioned within a patriarchy. How do we pay attention to them at least seeking command of their own lives?We understand how othering works. We see it every day in 2022. Simultaneously, Miguel and Ryan and the rest of the team have created a program where you have someone who is fundamentally othered in a position of power, but you tell the story from their perspective. That feels really unusual to me. How do you convince an electorate that you’re not other? How do you do that when the whole system is built on the belief and the rule that you are not the same?"

Rhaenyra does have one important man in her corner: her father King Viserys, who named her heir at the beginning of the series and is sticking to his guns. That said, Viserys had trouble keeping control of his court even when he was younger, and the years have not been kind. “Both of them have a huge capacity for stubbornness,” D’Arcy said. “They’re both terrible communicators. They both tend to recede when something is difficult or problematic, and they both do it at each other, whilst simultaneously there’s this deep love and desire for unification. So they spend a lot of time at an impasse. I really think some therapy would do worlds for their relationship because they have to verbalize, and yet neither will.”

Pretty much every characters who has ever appeared on Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon could use therapy. We’ll have to watch them work things out on each other instead.

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