Olivia Cooke is on track to make one darn good Alicent Hightower, IMO.
It just wouldn’t be Game of Thrones without a morally ambiguous royal playing, well, the game of thrones — and Olivia Cooke is here to reassure us that’s what we’ll see in the upcoming Thrones spinoff, House of the Dragon.
Cooke will play Alicent Hightower, second wife of Viserys I and a key player in the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons — the conflict at the center of HoTD. She recently spoke with Collider about her new film Naked Singularity, and while she kept details about the highly anticipated spinoff series to a minimum, she did say that Alicent is “very complex and I think people are gonna want to see the worst in her.”
The tantalizing bit about wanting to “see the worst” in Alicent aside, Cooke elaborated on how richly layered the characters are in the world of Westeros:
“What’s amazing about Game of Thrones, like we saw in the past series, is that one season, you hate a character, and the next, you absolutely love them and will go to the ends of the earth for them. 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 also spoke about the relationship to the original Game of Thrones and an audience’s expectations, noting that “it does help that the story is of a hundred years prior. We’re in the world of Game of Thrones, but you can also put yourself in a different headspace as well and know that, for an actor, you don’t have to necessarily follow on from what anyone else is doing.”
Personally, I’ve been excited about Cooke’s casting since day one (especially after seeing her performance in Sound of Metal) and this interview does nothing to dampen my enthusiasm. Keep following Watchers as we bring you all the news and happenings about HoTD!
