It is a truth universally acknowledged that people online sometimes have trouble distinguishing between a character they don’t like and the actor who plays them. For the actors who frequent places like Twitter, it can be a disheartening experience.
Take Olivia Cooke, who plays the cutthroat Alicent Hightower on HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. She appeared as part of TheWrap’s Power Women Summit alongside Haley Lu Richardson (The White Lotus), Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education) Xochitl Gomez (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness) and Tommy Dorfman (13 Reasons Why). Cooke joked that she’d been labeled as “an evil hag” online by House of the Dragon fans.
“That’s the thing: No one has anything nice to say,” Cooke said. “No one who goes and has, like, the gumption to commit thoughts to a tweet have anything nice to say. And so I was a bit depressed and didn’t want to leave the house for a little bit. But you have to, don’t you? It’s like this weird – you have to pick the scab.”
Alicent Hightower is “very wonky” morally
There are lots of fans who dislike Alicent Hightower, but if she was going to play the character, Cooke herself had to find a way to empathize with her. She said it took “months and months” of talking about Alicent for she and the team to get a handle on who she really was.
“Yeah, on the moral scale, she’s definitely very wonky, but it’s like what Haley was saying, you have to come from a place of empathy in order to imbue truth,” Cooke said. “Otherwise it just comes across as so disingenuous, and you just want the audience to have a really good time watching these characters, and you don’t want anything to feel fake or feel off.”
Alicent Hightower will return in the second season of House of the Dragon, due out sometime in 2024.
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