Olivia Cooke: House of the Dragon’s new queen of darkness
Game of Thrones is back, and with it, a new villainess vying for the crown. Viewers will love to hate Olivia Cooke in the much-awaited prequel House of the Dragon.
In its heyday, Game of Thrones broke ratings records and was watched by millions of people around the world. Olivia Cooke wasn’t one of them. “If someone is telling me to watch something, I’m like, obviously, I’ll get to it in my own time,” Cooke declares, full of early morning brio on Zoom from London, a pair of gold hoops swinging from her ears.
In fairness, the 28-year-old rising star – daughter of a sales representative and a police officer from Manchester – had a busy decade when HBO’s fantasy juggernaut was first dominating the small screen. (In Australia, Game of Thrones airs on Foxtel and Binge.) For a good five of those years, she was starring in a television series of her own, a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho called Bates Motel, while making films including Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi hit Ready Player One, which earned half a billion dollars at the box office, and Sound of Metal, the Oscar-winning drama about a drummer with hearing loss led by Riz Ahmed.
But when Cooke finally sat down during the 2020 lockdown to binge the series, based on George RR Martin’s best-selling books, she was struck with the same obsession that the show’s fans had felt for years for the gritty texture of this world, the murkiness of its moral code, the quick thrill of its rich seam of depravity.
“It’s obviously brilliant,” Cooke enthuses. “The political scheming, I loved. Cersei vying for dominance. Peter Dinklage’s role between all the worlds, his fingers in so many pies. The chess board that you saw playing out before you.” The actor is stellar company, chatty and forthright, a pair of endlessly expressive eyes – her secret weapon as a performer, able to convey everything from kindness to calculation – peeking out from behind a chestnut curtain fringe. “They completely flipped your allegiance from season to season,” Cooke adds. “It was just masterful.”
Cooke’s catchup on all things Westeros wasn’t merely an act of pandemic time-filling; the actor had been cast in a key role in House of the Dragon, the much anticipated prequel to Game of Thrones. Set 200 years before the original series, House of the Dragon follows the brutal Targaryen dynasty in its heyday, when Kings Landing was crawling with winged reptiles and the line of succession to the Iron Throne was engulfed in internecine warfare. Again.
Cooke stars as Alicent Hightower, daughter of the powerful – and power-hungry – courtier Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) and future wife of a foolhardy Targaryen ruler named King Viserys (Paddy Considine). She is also best friends with the King’s daughter, Princess Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), heir to the throne. That is, until Alicent births an heir of her own, and all fiery, dragon-related hell breaks loose, as it is wont to do in the world of Westeros, as any fan of Game of Thrones will remember well.
The first episode of House of the Dragon features mutilation, decapitation, an orgy in a brothel and the solemn intonation of the word “dracarys” (the high Valyrian word for “dragonfire”). Game of Thrones is back!
Have you missed it? It’s been more than three years since Game of Thrones took its bow, with a poorly received finale in which – spoiler alert for a series that ended in 2019 – Daenerys Targaryen was killed by her lover/nephew Jon Snow and Bran Stark was placed upon the Iron Throne. (“Hacky … cliched” was one critic’s determination. A change.org petition demanding the final season be remade “with competent writers” was signed by more than 1.8 million fans.)
The popular animosity towards that final season makes House of The Dragon’s premiere all the more fraught. Fans are counting on this prequel, overseen creatively by the author himself and co-produced by Miguel Sapochnik, the director of the original series’ most celebrated episodes, to right a whole lot of wrongs. Maisie Williams, who starred as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones – and who is Cooke’s friend – summed up this delicate position in a recent interview with Variety. “I think it’s actually a lot more pressure,” Williams explained. “All of the hung-over concerns of our show are now just being piled on to this new cast of people who had nothing to do with it.”
Speaking just a few weeks before the release of the first episode, after a rapturous ComicCon reception and a glittering Hollywood premiere alongside her co-stars Matt Smith and Eve Best, Cooke is remarkably sanguine. “I’ve really surprised myself, ‘cos I’m quite chill,” she reflects cheerfully. “But also because we’re a cast of about 700 people, it doesn’t feel like it’s all on either one of our shoulders.” Cooke also points out that she doesn’t appear in the first few episodes. (The series begins chronologically with Rhaenyra and Alicent as girls.) “I don’t know if I’m going to have a breakdown in a couple of months to come, but I just really enjoyed it all. Which is so unlike me ‘cos usually my brain definitely leans towards negative.”
Still, the particular pressure of playing Alicent comes from the fact that she is the likely inheritor of Cersei Lannister’s mantle, that of the villain audiences loved to hate. Cersei, as portrayed by Lena Headey, is Cooke’s favourite Game of Thrones character, so she welcomes the comparison. But in truth Alicent, prim and proper as if to the Red Keep born, is a fascinating blend of Cersei’s fierce maternal instincts with the weaponised femininity and political know-how of another notorious Game of Thrones figure, Natalie Dormer’s Margaery Tyrell.
Alicent is also, Cooke stresses, a “pawn” in her father’s dangerous power play, and at some point in the first season she becomes cognisant of that fact. “She’s really reckoning with what she thinks is this ideal patriarchal society that she’s been indoctrinated into and that she fully believes in,” Cooke shares. “What is actually her own personal thoughts and opinions, and what has just been molded by her father? I think what she’s vying for is justice and order and a certain sense of purity in herself in the kingdom, but yet completely fighting against her own moral wonkiness.”
It was director Miguel Sapochnik’s wife, development executive Alexis Raben, who suggested that the most fascinating dynamic within House of the Dragon was the fallout between Alicent and Rhaenyra. “These two women are so smart and so powerful, and what makes them brilliant is completely pitted against each other by these men. It’s divide and conquer, isn’t it? They’re weaker apart than they are together,” explains Cooke.
Speaking about the ideological fault line between Alicent and Rhaenyra, Sapochnik has described the former as a Game of Thrones version of “Women for Trump” and the latter as a punk rock anarchist. “I hate that,” Cooke frowns. “ ‘Cos I just don’t wanna give any more of my mental real estate to Trump. (Sapochnik) kept saying that to me in rehearsals, and I just sort of ignored it. I was like, yeah, she’s a product of the patriarchy. But I can’t give any more energy to that. And also, I need to find something to like about this woman.”
Cersei was so compelling as a villain because even though most of what she did was completely deplorable, viewers could understand exactly why she behaved the way that she did. Cooke’s Alicent appears to be cut from the same cloth. “I had huge waves of sympathy for her, because of her terrible parenting, and being looked at as a product that is only going to serve other people,” Cooke shares. “The tightrope that she’s walked from (childhood) … having her whole body and thoughts monitored constantly. I have a lot of empathy for someone who has had an upbringing like that.” Cooke takes a beat. “What she then does with it – not so much!”
Emily Carey, who plays Alicent as a girl alongside Australia’s Milly Alcock as the young Rhaenyra, made headlines in July when she tweeted: “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 was trolled by fans until she deleted the post.
Cooke bristles. “I think it’s so stupid that she was met with so much pushback for that, just like, shut up! You know, she’s 19, like, stop being f..king bullies.” Cooke wants to remind people that “the beauty of the Game of Thrones world” lies in its murkiness and complexity. “You meet these characters and at first you think she’s gonna be the villain, and then you end up finding something that you find really compelling about them,” sums up Cooke. “Jesus Christ, like, nothing’s black and white!” Also, Cooke adds, “f..king Twitter’s a cesspit, isn’t it?” She doesn’t have an account and for good reason. “You say anything and you get death threats … It’s not good.”
The message is clear: if Alicent is a villain, she is not one of her own making. Perhaps the real villain of the series is Otto, a schemer much like Charles Dance’s Tywin Lannister before him, using his daughter to further advance his own position. Martin also recently shared that every character in House of the Dragon would be capable of both good and evil, in the sense that “we all have things to be proud of and ashamed of”.
What is Alicent proud of? What has she done to cause her shame? Cooke weighs the question up, aware that she is tipping into spoiler territory. “I think she’s most proud of, and most ashamed of, her children,” Cooke says, carefully. “I can’t really say anything else, but what is supposed to bring her the biggest sense of joy actually brings her the most sadness and shame. And, you know, that’s a harsh mirror that is shone on her parenting. Or lack of.” Cooke’s performance embodies these dual sides of her character with nuance and, much like Headey before her, no small amount of empathy. Those searching for black and white in the notoriously grey world of Westeros might find themselves searching in vain.
These are the kinds of roles Cooke is drawn to. At just 28, she has already been acting for more than a decade. “It’s wild … Even though I’ve been working so solidly, it all of a sudden now feels like I’m sort of beginning,” she reflects. “I think I put such a lot of pressure on myself when I was younger, and I felt so grown up and so serious. And right now, as I’ve gotten older, I feel younger and sillier, and like I know less, which is really nice. I feel maybe I’ve relinquished a lot of the pressure.”
Cooke began acting as a child, taking after-school classes in her hometown at Oldham Theatre Workshop, whose alumni include Anna Friel and Suranne Jones.
She quit high school when she was cast in her first professional job in 2012 and applied to the celebrated acting school the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, but was rejected on the last round. The same day she received a letter informing her of the bad news, Cooke was cast in a horror film with Jared Harris and her career was kickstarted in earnest.
For the better part of a decade, she’s been seen on television as the savvy literary antihero Becky Sharp in an adaptation of Vanity Fair and just recently, as an inscrutable secret agent in Slow Horses alongside Gary Oldman.
She is also an indie cinema stalwart, headlining films including the 2015 Sundance darling Me, Earl and the Dying Girl, the project she is most pleased with. “That was the first time that someone was like, ‘You are an actor, and you are good, so I want you in this’,” Cooke reflects. “I was 20, and it was amazing.”
But really, what she’s most proud of is the way she has advocated for herself over the past decade in an industry that is at best, fickle, and at worst, downright dangerous. “I’m proud of myself, like (on) the jobs that were really, really hard, and when I was really, really young, and maybe there were slight moments where I was taken advantage of,” Cooke explains. “I’ve always been so steadfast in my sense of self, and knowing that I’m the only person that can protect me.”
And she’s delighted with House of the Dragon, its exhilarating scope, all its drama and intrigue, fire and brimstone. The prospect of spending the next decade of her career making more is actually kind of thrilling. “We did it for 10 months, and I’m still really excited to go back. If we do go back,” she clarifies. (A second season of House of the Dragon is yet to be greenlit.) This isn’t always the case. “I’ve done things before and I’ve been really just, proper dragging my heels,” Cooke admits. “But now I’m really, really excited.”
But first? A London premiere. And another in Amsterdam. And then a holiday in Sicily, maybe, if she can find a cheap enough Airbnb. (“I’ve left it so late that there’s just nothing … unless you want to pay like 10 grand a night, and I don’t want to do that.”) Recently, she’s been watching a lot of theatre in London’s West End: To Kill A Mockingbird, Jerusalem with Mark Rylance, Cock starring Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey.
Cooke moved back to London from the US just before the pandemic, because she missed a good cup of tea and her mum’s Sunday roast, and is reacquainting herself with the city with all the energy of a depraved lord of the seven kingdoms.
“Just eating and drinking,” Cooke sums up.
“The majority of my spare time it’s just like, oh, let’s try that restaurant. Oh, do you want a negroni? It’s five PM. Just pissed, usually. Pissed and full, which is nice. I’m definitely on my way to having gout.”
House of the Dragon streams on Binge and airs on Foxtel from August 22.
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