House of the Dragon actress Emily Carey cops absurd backlash over innocuous remark at Comic-Con

British actress Emily Carey has copped a bizarre backlash over a seemingly innocuous answer she gave to a question over the weekend.

Cast members from the upcoming Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon, came together for a panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, giving us fresh insights into their respective characters with only a month left before the show premieres.

An innocuous moment from the panel discussion triggered a snarky response from some fans. Nothing major – I would describe it as a micro-controversy, rather than a full-blown one – but it nevertheless illuminated one of the pitfalls of fan culture.

We shall be discussing light spoilers for House of the Dragon here, of the kind you will find in the show’s teasers, its full-length trailer from last week, or any of the interviews its writers and actors have given in recent months. Nothing remotely surprising or earth-shattering.

Still, if you wish to enter the show completely blind, you’d best stop reading.

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Milly Alcock (left) and Emily Carey (right) as the younger versions of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower. Picture: HBO/Binge

At the centre of this minor squabble on Saturday was Emily Carey, the 19-year-old British actress who plays the younger version of a character named Alicent Hightower.

(House of the Dragon’s plot spans multiple decades. Its two female leads, who begin the story as children, are each being portrayed by both a younger and older actress. Alicent is one of these characters. The other is her childhood friend turned rival, Rhaenyra Targaryen.)

It spoils very little to give you the basic premise of the story: Rhaenyra and Alicent are on opposite sides in a struggle over the royal line of succession. Eventually a bloody civil war breaks out, known in-universe as The Dance of the Dragons.

The show is mostly based on author George R.R. Martin’s spin-off book Fire and Blood, which tells the history of House Targaryen. Thus, book readers are going into it with an existing impression of the key characters.

Remember how some Game of Thrones viewers picked a team, cheering for certain characters and against others? For example, they may have been pro-Stark and anti-Lannister.

In much the same way, many readers of Fire and Blood already have a side, believing that either Rhaenyra or Alicent is in the right.

That is all the context you need for now, so enough preamble.

Milly Alcock and Emily Carey – the actresses playing young Rhaenyra and Alicent, respectively – at Comi-Con. Picture: FilmMagic for HBO

Prompted by showrunner Ryan Condal, Carey told the audience at Comic-Con that she had written a journal, in character, to help immerse herself in the role. She said she relished the degree of “freedom” the show had to fill in Alicent’s backstory, which isn’t explored in full depth in the source material.

“There were some gaps that we had to fill, so to figure it all out I sort of started journaling, and with the help of Ryan and Miguel (the other showrunner, Miguel Sapochnik) I managed to come up with some form of backstory, and it proved to be very useful,” she explained.

“I’ve never had the freedom to create a whole human being like this before. So it was so much fun being able to go so in depth with her.”

Asked what she had learned from her journaling, Carey highlighted the “multifaceted” nature of Alicent as a character.

“I think it gave me a deeper understanding of Alicent. I think she’s so multifaceted. There are so many layers to her. I think lots of people are already expecting her to be the villain of the show, but I think bringing her in younger, there was a lot more to explore,” she said.

So, what we have here is an actress who’s taking her role seriously, and seeking to understand the perspective of the character she is playing. In other words, she is doing her job.

Yet some of the fandom’s Rhaenyra supporters, who are entering this series having already decided Alicent is a villain, took umbrage.

Here is one of the more polite responses.

Yes, book nerds, Carey did read the source material. Picture: Twitter

The implication: if Carey doesn’t think her character is the villain of the story, she must not have read the source material. Or alternatively, she must not have comprehended it.

There is a snarkiness and arrogance there that I find unseemly.

“I stand by what I said in the panel,” Carey later said on Twitter, responding to the critics.

“Alicent is not the villain, folks. When we meet her she’s a child, a product of the patriarchy. Just you wait and see. Maybe you’ll sympathise.”

Carey has since felt the need to delete that tweet.

The irony here is that Fire and Blood, unlike the source material for Game of Thrones, is a subjective text which leaves its events open to interpretation. This is very much by design. It is written not as a novel, but as a history textbook of sorts, drawing on multiple sources who often tell conflicting versions of events.

I’ll give you one relatively non-spoilery example. At one point, two knights who also happen to be brothers find themselves facing off on opposing sides. They fight, each leaving the other with mortal wounds.

One of the book’s sources, Grand Maester Munkun, reports that the brothers died in each other’s arms with tears running down their cheeks. But another source, a dwarf nicknamed Mushroom, says the pair bitterly denounced each other as traitors.

The two accounts are incompatible. One might be true, or perhaps neither. All we know for certain is that the knights fought and died. This is the nature of a great many conversations and events described in Fire and Blood.

That sort of ambiguous storytelling is not possible on screen, which is why Condal and Sapochnik have said House of the Dragon will provide the “objective account” of what happened during The Dance of the Dragons.

The point here is that no one can reach an objective judgment based only on the source material, because it is not 100 per cent reliable. So maybe hold off on picking sides until you see the full, “objective” story, book readers.

Emily Carey at Comic-Con. Picture: FilmMagic for HBO

It is also worth noting that Martin is famous for writing complex, grey characters. Even someone like Cersei in the original series had redeeming qualities, while the more honourable characters – looking at you, Ned Stark – had glaring flaws.

So if you are expecting the rivalry between Rhaenyra and Alicent in House of the Dragon to be a tale with a clear “good” and “bad” side, you are setting yourself up for a surprise.

Martin was actually sitting two seats down from Carey on the Comic-Con panel, and made a remark to that effect.

“We’re not going to have anyone who’s called Lord Evil,” the author quipped.

“There is certainly evil. I always believed that the most interesting characters are great characters. They’re capable of generosity, good and love. And next week they do something they’re ashamed of.”

Funnily enough it was Carey copping the criticism afterwards, not Martin. Which is curious.

‘They’re all flawed. They’re all human’

If you are interested in wading a tad deeper into spoiler territory, the two actresses playing Alicent have spoken on other occasions about her background and worldview.

“There is a preconceived notion that she’s scheming,” Carey told Entertainment Weekly for its recent feature on the show.

“You can understand why,” Olivia Cooke, who plays the older version of Alicent, added.

“The woman whispering into a powerful man’s ear has never been positively written about. So the fun was to try to find the nuance.”

The two actresses did not work together on their separate portrayals of Alicent, citing the years-long time jump we are expecting to happen mid-season. But in that EW interview, Cooke provided plenty of context for the point Carey would later make at Comic Con.

“She’s quite an anxious rule follower in comparison to how free and mischievous Rhaenyra is,” Cooke said.

“When you realise that you haven’t been nurtured in the way that Rhaenyra has – her best friend that she’s seen grow up, have everything given to her, and had the unbridled love of her father – that is a really tough pill to swallow.”

Rhaenyra’s father, King Viserys Targaryen, is a good man but a fairly poor ruler, according to Martin and the showrunners. His aversion to conflict ends up leading the realm into war, but he does dote on Rhaenyra and turn a blind eye towards her alleged transgressions.

Alicent, however, is not a princess. She plays by the rules of court, living a much more restrained life than her friend, and helping the political maneouvrings of her less affectionate father, Ser Otto Hightower.

You can see how she could be written as a flawed but sympathetic character.

In a separate interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Cooke acknowledged that her character has “a very dark side to her”, but noted that she is “just striving for what she thinks is good, even though it’s just misplaced”.

We’ll end with one last, extremely relevant quote from Martin.

“There’s no Arya, (no) character everybody is going to love. They’re all flawed. They’re all human. They do good things; they do bad things. They are driven by lust for power, jealousy, old wounds – just like human beings. Just like I wrote them.”