House of the Dragon is the first Game of Thrones prequel coming to HBO, with a premiere scheduled for 2022. The network has remained quiet about series details, but one star is making some big promises. According to Olivia Cooke (Alicent Hightower), House of the Dragon is absolutely “mind-blowing.”
‘House of the Dragon’ is set two centuries before ‘Game of Thrones’
House of the Dragon jumps back 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones and focuses on a specific part of Targaryen history — the Dance of the Dragons. A bloody and brutal Targaryen civil war.
Based on George R. R. Martin’s novel Fire & Blood — which chronicles the rule of House Targaryen from the beginning — House of the Dragon will begin a little more than a century after Aegon I’s conquest of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.
Olivia Cooke plays Alicent Hightower, a ‘complex’ character in a fight for the Iron Throne
Cooke’s character is Alicent Hightower, the wife of King Viserys I Targaryen. When he dies, Alicent wants her son Aegon to become the new king. But she gets involved in a bloody power struggle when Rhaenyra Targaryen — Viserys’ daughter from another marriage — is willing to fight to keep that from happening.
If the character is anything like she is in Martin’s book, Alicent is full of contradictions. Just like the best characters from Game of Thrones. Cooke promises that Alicient is “very complex,” and she thinks “people are gonna want to see the worst in her.”
“You just don’t know what you’re gonna get with these characters. They’re so well-written. Such is the human condition, you can do some horrendous things, but then you can also do some wonderful things as well. It’s very complex, and it’s not black and white at all,” Cooke told Collider.
The ‘House of the Dragon’ star calls the prequel ‘mind blowing’
Cooke says that one of the things that would surprise most fans about making a show like House of the Dragon is the amount of people it takes to make such an epic, fantasy series.
“The crew is a hundred strong. The artistry involved is mind-blowing,” Cooke explained. “The sets that have been created are f–king gorgeous, and the costumes. Down to the tiny prop that you hold in your hands, there’s just so much thought that goes into it and so much history as well. It’s amazing to work on a film, a TV show, or anything where everyone is just so passionate about it.”
The civil war is mentioned in ‘Game of Thrones’
There will obviously be links between House of the Dragon and Game of Thrones. The original series in Westeros actually documented the Dance of the Dragons with a mention.
In the fifth episode of Game of Thrones, Princess Shireen Baratheon told the story and reminded her father Stannis: “Brothers fought brothers, dragons fought dragons. By the time it was over, thousands were dead.”
The war had serious consequences for the House Targaryen, as almost all of their dragons died in the war. Then, they became extinct for a century and a half until Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) hatched her three in Game of Thrones.
‘House of the Dragon’ will not have graphic violence against women for ‘no reason’
Game of Thrones fans got used to seeing shocking scenes with graphic violence against women during its eight-season run. But Cooke says that’s not how they are doing things on House of the Dragon.
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable in being a part of anything that has just egregious graphic violence towards women for no reason whatsoever, just because they want it to be tantalizing in a way that gets viewers,” Cooke told The Telegraph. “I don’t think they’d be in their right minds to include any of that anymore.”
House of the Dragon will premiere sometime in 2022 on HBO. All eight seasons of Game of Thrones are available on HBO Max.
