Alicent and Rhaenyra are "haunting one another" in House of the Dragon season 2

Like Game of Thrones before it, House of the Dragon has a large cast of characters, but some are the first among equals, you might say. In season 1, the story revolved around Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower, former best friends who now find themselves on opposite sides of a war. In season 2, they'll be separated, possibly for the entire run of new episodes, but the show still finds ways to connect them through editing and mood. You'll think of one when the other is onscreen.

"I feel like Rhaenyra sneezes and Alicent catches a cold, you know?" quipped Olivia Cooke, who plays Alicent, when speaking to Vogue. "There’s this ripple effect constantly back and forth. Rhaenyra is this phantom to Alicent at this point. She gets bigger and bigger and bigger in Alicent’s mind and she’s desperate to reconnect and have some sort of face time with Rhaenyra to commune and say sorry but also try and put a plaster over this huge chasm."

Emma D'Arcy, who plays Rhaenyra, agrees. "They’re sort of haunting one another," D'Arcy said. "There’s a lot of death in the show, but these characters are also being haunted by the living, by the missing people in their lives."

In the meanwhile, they'll both get on with their own stories, as Alicent tries to manage her sniping family in King's Landing while Rhaenyra mounts a war against her own half-brother Aegon Targaryen, Alicent's son, from Dragonstone. "In terms of motivations and broad themes, for Alicent, it’s sort of about diminishing power," Cooke said. "And what does she do when she doesn’t have agency or any semblance of autonomy within the castle? And who is she if she can’t shape the realm in the background? That was really interesting."

Rhaenyra does have power, but will have to deal with dissension in her ranks, not to mention lingering grief over the deaths of her father King Viserys and her son Luke. "I think grief is a major engine in the narrative this season," D'Arcy said. "That was a key area of investigation for me, because grief manifests so differently in different people. I think there’s something beautiful in the way that [writers] Ryan [Condal], Sara [Hess], and the team constructed this [season], in that so many of the key characters are in quite pronounced stages of grief when we meet them at the start of the first [season], and not only does grief dislocate a person from their community, but it can also make people strangers to one another—like multiple grieving people can be quite profoundly changed. So, you end up with this family of strangers who are trying to navigate one another, and navigate the extreme emotional states that are happening within them, too. So, that as the image of the fallout of losing the patriarchal head of the family and the head of state is really astute and quite thrilling."

Of course, there are other people in Alicent and Rhaenyra's lives with whom they'll be spending a lot more time this season. "Like with Game of Thrones, one of the joys of a show like this, which has such an amazing, complicated constellation of characters, is seeing what happens when different people collide," D'Arcy said. "I felt very lucky to get to investigate some different relationships this season, not least because it brings out different aspects of a character. Particularly with Rhaenyra, I think she has very complicated friendships with other women—they’re never straightforward, and it was interesting to think more about that and what that brings up in her."

Alight Hightower will leave the castle in season 2 of House of the Dragon

In the trailer for House of the Dragon season 2, we seen a few shots of Alicent — wearing her signature green — traipsing through a field somewhere. It doesn't look much like King's Landing, where she spends pretty much the entirety of her time in George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood. "I got to leave the castle and go to Spain," Cooke said.

A change of scenery was something Cooke asked for, although we don't know the details of how it's incorporated into Alicent's story. "If you don’t ask, you don’t get. They wrote it in and I hope it works for the plot [laughs]. I was in Spain for two weeks and that was nice."

We'll start to unravel mysteries like this after the second season of House of the Dragon kicks off this Sunday on HBO and Max.

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