‘House Of The Dragon’ star says she was told to play her role as ‘wife for Trump’

A MAGA hat would have clashed with her green robes anyway.

Olivia Cooke will reprise the role of Emily Carey’s Alicent Hightower in the upcoming sixth episode of ‘House of the Dragon’” Sunday.

Cooke will portray an older version of the character and told Entertainment Weekly in a post on Wednesday that the show’s creators, Miguel Sapochnik and Ryan Condal, originally offered him a very specific source of inspiration for his character.

Cooke told the outlet that they asked her to play Alicent “like a wife for Trump.”

But Cooke said she couldn’t take it.

“I just didn’t want to give them any more mental real estate than they already had,” Cooke said of a certain political family. “So I tried to find a different route to her, but I could see what they were saying with this complete indoctrination and denial of her own autonomy and rights. I just couldn’t be asked to borrow this way.

It’s easy to see why the showrunners of “House of the Dragon” felt that an older Alicent would fit right in with a far-right mindset if she lived in modern-day America.

Emily Carey’s portrayal of Alice thus far paints the image of a young woman who is used by older, more powerful men as a pawn for their own political gain. Her father, Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), ordered her to secretly endear herself to the newly widowed and vulnerable King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine). After Viserys marries Alicent, he ends up treating his queen like a walking womb.

“How romantic it must be to be imprisoned in a castle and forced to bring heirs out,” Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock) told Alicent in a very poignant moment in Episode 4.

“Alicent was completely bred to breed and to sire powerful men. That’s his only function in this life,” Cooke told EW. “She can tell herself that she’s going to influence and nurture and persuade in a very feminine and feminine way, but that’s bullshit. Unless you fight the men, you will never be heard. It is learning to live in this yoke of oppression. How can I move inch by inch every day to loosen the straps? »

Cooke then hinted at what viewers could expect to see in her portrayal of an older Alicent – and it appears she’s taken a page out of Carey’s playbook to play the controversial character with more nuance..

Cooke told the entertainment magazine it was essential to find a “humanitarian hook” in Alicent.

“She does some fucking despicable stuff,” she admits. “But then you have to think, she is trying to protect her son. She tries to maintain the patriarchy. She tries to maintain the legitimacy of the crown. All these things she feels are so much bigger than her. I think that’s why when she can’t control that, she turns to faith more as some kind of tangible control, because she has none in her life.

Read the full article in Entertainment Weekly.