Olivia Cooke’s purpose grows as Alicent in ‘House of the Dragon’

The first time Olivia Cooke cried on camera, in the 2014 British horror flick “The Quiet Ones,” she was admittedly thrilled.

“I was crying on cue, and I just thought, ‘Yep, f— BAFTA,’” she says, laughing at how far her acting career has progressed in 10 years. These days, Cooke spends a lot of her time on set crying — and sobbing and screaming — on command. It comes with the territory of playing Alicent Hightower on HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” returning for a second season on Sunday. And this year, as Cooke puts it, everything is “dire.”

“It feels more expansive and things are ramping up,” Cooke says, speaking from the kitchen table in her home in London. “It’s a fantasy, but this is also what’s happening to the characters, and the stakes are high.”

Cooke, 30, has invited me over for breakfast (avocado toast and smoked salmon served with a croissant on the side) to discuss becoming Alicent in the “Game of Thrones” prequel, although the conversation veers rapidly from the series to her favorite plays on the West End to the neighborhood cats that regularly appear in her backyard.

“There’s like a cat coven,” she says. “They all congregate in here, and they just watch me. I’m the high priestess of all the cats.”

It’s unsurprising that the local pets flock to Cooke, who holds herself with a regal air even when she’s brewing coffee and taking bites of toast in between speaking. It’s a trait she showcases onscreen in “House of the Dragon” as a character whose shifting allegiance has brought two opposing factions of the Targaryen family to the brink of war.

In Season 1, Cooke arrived midway through the story, taking over from Emily Carey, who played the younger version of Alicent, the childhood best friend of Rhaenyra Targaryen, played by Milly Alcock and later Emma D’Arcy.

“Everything hinged on me and Emma having really good, powerful performances when we got introduced in Episode 6,” Cooke says. “Because you’re replacing two of your leads, and that’s a really radical thing to do midseason on a really popular show. We were blissfully ignorant of the pressure [at the time]. Viewers could have really switched off. But I think it worked.”

At first, though, Cooke wasn’t even sure she wanted the job. She’d been acting for a decade, in a broad variety of roles, and being defined by a massive TV series wasn’t exactly what she had in mind for her career.

“I was really deliberating about it for ages,” she says. “Then I spoke to my manager and my agent, and they convinced me to audition.”

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the audition process was “just sending self-tapes into the void,” as Cooke describes it. There were multiple rounds, and she was in contention for both Rhaenyra and Alicent, but showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik eventually homed in on her for the Hightower noble who becomes queen of Westeros. By that point, Cooke knew she wanted the role.

Condal, who is the sole showrunner for Season 2, also remembers the process feeling endless. But, out of everyone they saw, Cooke imbued Alicent with “the most human performance,” he says.

“Olivia just brought real pathos and complexity and humanity to the role right from just reading the pages,” Condal says over Zoom. “It was one of the clearest presentations of ‘this is who it’s meant to be’ that I’ve ever had in my career.”

Although the specter of “Game of Thrones” loomed large, Cooke had never really watched the series. But after being cast as Alicent and waiting for the production to get a greenlight to start shooting during the pandemic, she watched the show and began to understand what “House of the Dragon” could be.

Season 2 showrunner Ryan Condal said Olivia Cooke imbued Alicent with “the most human performance.”

(Theo Whiteman / HBO)

“I got really, really excited,” she says. “And then meeting Emma at Miguel’s house at Christmastime solidified my excitement for it. [And having] endless meetings with Miguel and Ryan about the character. Because both Rhaenyra and Alicent aren’t all that present in the book, so being able to craft this character with the writers and the showrunners was exciting.”

It’s fitting, she says, that the female characters are ellipses in George R.R. Martin’s book “Fire & Blood,” which contains an unreliable account of the “Dance of the Dragons” civil war because it’s told by three narrators.

“Women are always omitted in the annals of history,” Cooke says. “It’s really potent, that absence. What were these two characters doing? You have to read between the lines with Rhaenyra and Alicent.”

D’Arcy adds, speaking over the phone, that the actors had “no illusions about the scale of the task at hand” when they were cast. “You’re taking on such a beloved object. However, I think we both felt that returning to Westeros from the perspective of two women looking to hold power was potentially a good enough reason. That gave us something to fight for.”

The two characters are even more fleshed out in Season 2, picking up on the heels of the first season’s tumultuous finale, which saw Alicent putting her son Aegon on the throne, usurping Rhaenyra’s own claim after King Viserys named her heir.

Condal describes Alicent’s journey this season as “an ongoing expansion of the character,” although he admits the episodes “really put Alicent through her paces.” That was something Cooke felt deeply.

“In this season, she’s so adrift,” Cooke says, joking that there are only so many miserable faces she can make. “She’s losing her power. With Rhaenyra and Alicent, it’s like a butterfly effect, so as Rhaenyra is gaining power, the hourglass is turned over and the power is waning from Alicent, and her influence is waning as well. There’s an imaginary rope between [the two characters] that carries them throughout seasons.”

Season 2 opens with the characters split apart. Rhaenyra is grieving the loss of her son Lucerys at the hand of Alicent’s one-eyed son Aemond in Dragonstone. Alicent remains in King’s Landing, where Aegon sits on the Iron Throne. Cooke says Alicent “gets a massive dose of the reality” when her “psycho sons” take control of the realm.

“[She is] being forced to reckon with sublimating her own power in the raising of her sons,” Condal says. “The minute she puts Aegon on the throne, her great power as the queen of the Seven Kingdoms is immediately diminished.”

The separate storylines for Alicent and Rhaenyra meant the actors didn’t get to spend as much time together on set this season, to their disappointment. It also meant that the uneasy relationship between Rhaenyra and Alicent unfolds over a distance — at least early on. Cooke refuses to say whether the characters reunite for fear of spoilers. But Condal acknowledges that it’s essential to the story for fans to see the characters together again.

“So much of the fun and the drama is taking these characters who have these complicated relationships and separating them because of the forces of politics and the war at hand,” he says. “And then finding ways to bring them back together, and seeing how the world and the war have changed them.”

On a more positive note, Alicent has the opportunity to explore her sexuality this season, coupling up with a character who will, for now, remain unnamed (let’s just say he matches her freak). It’s a rare expression of freedom for a woman who has lacked agency, which Condal says has “greatly affected who her character is.”

“That was really important because you’ve not seen Alicent experience that in her adult life, and all of a sudden, she has all these teenage, passionate feelings toward someone,” Cooke says. “I think that makes her feel insane.”

After seven months of production, which wrapped in September, Cooke was “absolutely knackered” — a polite British way of saying the experience had completely depleted her.

“Last season, Emma and I were only in four episodes each,” Cooke says. “So we’d walk in and be full of beans when everyone else was at death’s door. Then I think we both really felt the enormity of the schedule. And it’s so emotional. Both of us are just either sobbing or screaming all the time. I don’t know if I smile in Season 2.”

Despite the exhaustion, Cooke loves playing Alicent. She’s a character of “so many subterranean levels of repression and anger and despair and passion,” which is a huge gift. Cooke has compassion and empathy for her, and she understands why Alicent does manipulative, devious things.

“She’s smarter than all the men as well and she could rule and she’d be really f— good at it,” Cooke says. “It’s so frustrating that she can’t believe she would be this amazing ruler because she’s so indoctrinated by the patriarchy and by her father. She’s been molded to talk sweetly into the ears of these powerful men, and it’s such a disservice to who she is and what she’s capable of.”

Olivia Cooke on what to expect from Alicent and Rhaenyra this season: “Both of us are just either sobbing or screaming all the time. I don’t know if I smile in Season 2.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

Before Season 1 premiered, Cooke was worried that her personal life might become too public for comfort. Although she spent four years on the series “Bates Motel,” Cooke for most of her career has been able to do work she’s proud of without giving up her anonymity.

“I just didn’t want my life to change,” she says. “It’s such a big TV show, and I hadn’t ever done anything to this scale before. Or if I had, it was a film that comes out and then goes away and doesn’t live in the culture for years and years and years.”

So far, Cooke’s fears have gone mostly unfounded. She’s recognized, sure, but not in a way that disrupts her daily life. And when it does, fans are generally nice about it, like recently when she was on the London Underground going home and a group of drunken girls started shouting “Alicent” in her direction.

“It’s actually been all right,” she says, sounding as if she doesn’t quite believe it. “I think you notice an uptick as the show is about to come out because they’re promoting it more.”

Cooke calls herself a “catastrophizer” and admits she can be hard on herself when reflecting on a performance. But those fears are also unsupported. D’Arcy, who has become Cooke’s close friend, describes her as “one of the most intelligent and insightful people I’ve ever met.”

“Her eyes are so striking and I feel that they speak in such full sentences,” D’Arcy says of Cooke. “It can be quite shocking, honestly, to encounter. That’s what makes sharing a set with her such a privilege and also a great lesson to any actor. In the context of shooting for six months or longer, with those long days, it’s wonderful to be woken up like that.”

(Cooke, for the record, feels similarly about her co-star, saying of D’Arcy, “They’re such a powerhouse and it only makes me want to do better. Everything is cemented in absolute truth, and you can’t help but ricochet off that.”)

Cooke’s ability to captivate a viewer with unspoken ferocity and emotion has driven her in films like “Thoroughbreds” and “Sound of Metal,” and on TV shows like “Bates Motel” and “Slow Horses.” Although she appeared in only a few episodes of the first season of “Slow Horses,” Cooke hints that her character Sid may return in a forthcoming season (“I don’t know,” she says, grinning slyly, when asked).

These days, she wants to “embark on more of the unknown,” something the actor is aiming to do with her production company Chippy Tea, which she formed two years ago. Her first production, a romance film called “Takes One to Know One,” will shoot in Rome early next year and stars Jamie Bell alongside Cooke. She also wants to try her hand at directing.

“When I’m on set, I’m always figuring out how things work and almost shadowing the director,” Cooke says. “I find acting a lot of the time to be so insular. You can get in your own way. I like the collaborative process of making something from the ground up, and I want to do more of that. It’s also taking control of my own destiny a little bit more.”

As for Alicent, well, she may not be so lucky. But Cooke wants to play her for as long as possible.

“I really want her to just go off and be in the forest with some chickens,” she says, jokingly. “But really, there’s some good stuff for her for Season 3, if we get it. Really exciting stuff.”