‘My mum says I’m not working class any more!’: Olivia Cooke on power, privilege, and dividing audiences in House of Dragon | House of the Dragon
house of the Dragon is an enormous tv sequence. Over two seasons, the prequel to Game of Thrones has seduced viewers with its plotting, backstabbing, candlelit conferences about battle, and huge sheep-munching dragons. Olivia Cooke’s dad, nevertheless, did not get the memo.
We’re in London, on a stormy summer season afternoon, and Cooke is sipping a bottle of neon juice (“Tell me if my teeth go purple”). Her dad texted her yesterday. She will get her cellphone and pulls up a photograph of a tv display screen, with the first season of House of the Dragon loaded up and able to go. “He said: ‘Raining outside, so starting a binge-watch.’” She laughs. “I was like, great, Dad, worked on it for six years, hope you like, kiss kiss.” What was his assessment? “Yes, I like it. Quite violent.” He was planning to observe one other episode after he’d picked up Cooke’s nephew from college.
Cooke could also be simply 32, however to be truthful to her dad, there’s a lot of her work to catch up on. The actor grew up in Oldham. When she was 18, she moved to Vancouver to affix the solid of one other prequel, the Psycho spin-off Bates Motel. After that, she lived in New York for just a few busy however sad years, earlier than shifting again to London, simply earlier than the pandemic (taking pictures the movie Pixie in Belfast, she realized: “Oh my God, I don’t have to beat down my sense of humor any more”). She has made motion pictures, starring in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and with Riz Ahmed in sound of metal. She was a superb Becky Sharp in ITV’s adaptation of Vanity Fair and appeared briefly as the MI5 agent Sid in spy thriller Slow Horses. But House of the Dragon, in which she performs the scheming and morally murky Alicent Hightower, has been a gamechanger.
The sequence is predicated on the George RR Martin ebook Fire & Blood, and whereas it’s by no means simple to be succinct about the world of Westeros, the tough gist of it’s this: Alicent was childhood finest pals with Rhaenyra Targaryen (performed as an grownup by Emma D’Arcy), and betrays her by marrying Rhaenyra’s father, King Viserys, to turn into queen. She then bore heaps of ethically doubtful blond heirs to the Iron Throne (season one), went to battle with Rhaenyra for the crown after Viserys’s demise (season two), and, in the finale, waved the white flag and made a deal to surrender her son to Rhaenyra, in order to help Rhaenyra’s declare to be the true queen.
In quick, you may say that as season three approaches, Alicent has so much on her plate. One reviewer referred to as her “the saddest woman in Westeros”, however Cooke is not so certain that the description matches. “I don’t think she really has time to reflect on how she is feeling inside,” she says.
Alicent has been a divisive determine amongst followers of the present, notably in the earlier days, when the character labored in opposition to Rhaenyra’s declare to the throne. But Cooke has observed that lately Alicent has been a focus for some queer girls and non-binary individuals. “Alicent is a product of the patriarchy,” she says. In season one, her marriage to the king was engineered by her father, though current episodes have seen “an unraveling of everything that she’s learned, and she’s becoming liberated, in a sense. I don’t want to say that she is living the queer experience, because she’s definitely not, but I don’t know if there’s something that is relatable there.”
Other viewers are much less supportive. “It can be quite vitriolic at times. I don’t want this to come across as ‘Woe is me’, because I’m very grateful for the job,” Cooke says, rigorously, “but to field insults when you’re just walking down the street…”
I assumed that it could be principally digital, however it’s in the actual world, too? “Yeah! They want a picture with you, then afterwards, they’ll say, ‘I fucking hate your character, by the way,’ or, ‘Your character’s a cunt.'” What do you say to that? “I sort of laugh and say: ‘Well, you can delete that picture,’” she shrugs. “I don’t know what you can do. I just try and take it in my stride.”
Cooke acquired rid of her personal Instagram six months in the past. In particular person, she is humorous and pleasant, and once I ask her what she did, she ditch it for good, her purpose is charmingly particular. “I was sick of seeing 21-year-old looksmaxxers being like: ‘If you follow a program, this is what you can do,’ and it’s a side-by-side picture of him at 14, going through puberty, and him now, saying: ‘Look at the transformation.’” Her algorithm had picked up on her morbid fascination with bodily extremes. “It’s a lot. It’s very navel-gazy, and it distorts your mental image of your body and your self. And I think that you have tricked into our industry, as well.” It was an excessive amount of for her mind to deal with, so she deleted her account and hasn’t appeared again.
For a brief interval of time, she was a meme herself. “Was I?” she says, wanting all of the sudden panicked. Not lately, don’t fret, I say, however the negroni … “Oh yes,” she replies, visibly highlighted. When Cooke and D’Arcy had been first selling House of the Dragon, a clip of the pair discussing their favourite drinks went viral. D’Arcy had mentioned their drink of alternative was a negroni sbagliato (“with prosecco in it”). “Ooh, stunnin’,” Cooke replied.
“I just thought it was interesting that in our attention-deficit economy, that after a very wide-ranging career, that was the thing I was most notable for,” she says as we speak. “But like everything, it lasted for about 15 minutes.” Has she needed to take away that phrase from her vocabulary? “What, sbagliato? That was maybe the second time I’d ever said it.”
No, I imply “stunning”.
“Oh! Maybe. Just initially. Out of annoyance.” She has usually mentioned that she will be opposite. “And I can get a bit of an attitude when it comes to these things, but it was all good-natured. It was just very bizarre.”
On the topic of sudden hits, at the finish of final summer season Cooke starred in the very enjoyable, very pulpy thriller The Girlfriendwhich turned out to be one other smash. In it, her character, the bold property agent Cherry Laine, went face to face together with her boyfriend Daniel’s mom, the wealthy artwork supplier Laura, performed by Robin Wrightwho additionally directed the sequence (Laura thinks Cherry’s a social climber; Cherry thinks Laura’s a snob). It was moreish and addictive, however its success took Cooke abruptly, just because there may be a lot TV popping out on streaming each week. “I didn’t expect it to capture people’s attention like that.” But she will see why it did. “Girlfriend and mother-in-law relationships, that’s quite powerful. There’s a lot of nuance and passive aggression to dig into and exacerbate and exaggerate.”
As with Alicent, audiences had been divided about whether or not they supported Cherry or Laura. Cooke’s mum was on Cherry’s facet – “I was like, yeah, because you can’t differentiate between me and any character I play” – although, given some of its extra specific scenes, her dad described it as “being a bit like a radio play for him”. Although contemplating that – spoiler alert – Laura had pretended her personal son had died in order to get him away from Cherry, a surprising quantity of individuals had been on the mum’s facet. “Boy mums,” Cooke says conspiratorially. “A lot of boy mums were on Laura’s side.”
As nicely as all the flashy melodrama, it had a degree to make about snobbery and the British class system. Daniel was from a wealthy household, and Cherry from a poor one. No matter how a lot she tried to suit in to his world, it was by no means fairly ok. “To try to get into those networks, it’s like trying to cut through steel with a twig,” Cooke says, poetically. “It’s impossible to penetrate, and Cherry had to learn the hard way. But it’s the same now. It’s really hard to navigate the upper echelons of society. I mean, not that I would want to,” she laughs. “But it’s a whole culture to itself.”
Cooke has spoken earlier than about the challenges of being an actor from a working-class background, with a northern accent, and how the leisure business is constructed on the form of networks and pre-existing connections that exist in these higher echelons of society. She jokes that her mom now scoffs each time she refers to herself as working class. “She’s like, you’re not working class any more,” she laughs. “I think my sensitivity is still working class. I just have become, against all odds, very successful in my field.”
When she was eight, Cooke began going to the Oldham Theater Workshop, a youth theater group that additionally nurtured the likes of Anna Friel, Suranne Jones and Joseph Gilgun. At the time, it was at the finish of her avenue. “My mum was just like, ballet’s not worked out, let’s chuck her in there.” What went mistaken with ballet? “My mom said I answered the teacher back too many times.” (When casting The Girlfriend, Wright mentioned she selected Cooke as a result of she had “moxie.”) Had she expressed any curiosity in performing earlier than? “I was the eldest daughter of two, and a child of divorce,” she says, drily. “So there was a lot of ‘Look at me, love me’.”
She feels strongly that there needs to be extra drama workshops obtainable to younger individuals, notably from working-class areas. “There is a huge amount of talent to be found in these places, but you need to fund them, and it can’t just be the Harrow and Eton lot, because you’re only going to get one side of the story, and it’s not going to be truthful.” Without teams equivalent to the Oldham Theater Workshop, TV, movie and theater all begin to look the identical. “It just becomes completely homogenized, and it’s fucking boring.” A pause, then she laughs: “She says, getting riled up.”
But speaking about it’s important, she continues. “I thought with a Labor government, these things would be prioritized, but it feels like it’s not.” There is much less and much less funding for the arts, and she is evident about what’s being misplaced. “Even if you don’t want to be an actor, it’s important to have a place to go and express yourself, and not be locked in your room on your phone. You’re able to develop social skills. Children today are so isolated. And with the rise of the manosphere, the antidote to that is play, and showing boys that they can be tender and emotional, and that it’s beautiful and cool and mind-expanding to be on stage.”
Cooke has to go off to a gathering, a couple of top-secret script. She has three movies popping out in the close to future. There are two horrors: Visitation, in which she performs a nun, and Brides, which is extra of a gothic romance. There is a movie about the crime novelist Patricia Highsmith – initially referred to as Switzerland, though it might now have a brand new title – which might be directed by Anton Corbijn. He made Cooke’s favourite movie, the Joy Division biopic Control, so she was joyful to get the probability to grill him about that.
Meanwhile, House of the Dragon is because of finish with a fourth and closing season. As ever, in Westeros, it is inconceivable to say who will make it out alive. “In the book, I survive until the end of the story,” she says, that means that Alicent would possibly nicely be in with an opportunity. “So good behavior-willing, I won’t get the chop.” Her dad, then, has acquired much more catching as much as do.
Season three of House of the Dragon begins on HBO Max, Sky Atlantic & Now on 22 June.
