Olivia Cooke is spilling on a “carnal” and “animalistic” sex scene fans will likely never see.
“Game of Thrones” fans are naturally overjoyed that HBO’s prequel series “House of the Dragon” is back, but Sunday’s return coincided with a revealing interview with Elle — in which Cooke divulged that her most bestial sex scene was left on the cutting room floor.
“It was messy as fuck,” she told the outlet. “It wasn’t beautiful, and that was really fun to do.”
“I think Ryan [Condal, the showrunner] said we weren’t learning any more about the characters, which I disagree with slightly, but it’s OK,” continued Cooke. “It’s his show.”
The actor reportedly laughed after positing the scene could end up on a blooper reel, suggesting it might truly never see the light of day. For those keeping up with the show, however, Cooke’s character, Queen Alicent Hightower, is clearly still a red-blooded royal.
Hightower notably explored her carnal lust and pleasures with Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) in Sunday’s Season 2 premiere and, as a young mother of three who married her friend’s father, Viserys Targaryen, as a child, never got to have a flirtatious youth herself.
“I think for her, it represents teenagedom,” she told Elle. “It’s passion. She’s never had that.”
“I thought there’d be way more,” she added about her sex scenes in the show, “and so I’m relieved that when it has been used for me, it’s showing Alicent being pleasured, which is amazing and doesn’t feel gratuitous. It feels like we’re telling a story.”
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“Dragon” premiered three years after the contentious finale of “Game of Thrones,” both of which are based on the “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels by George RR Martin. The sexual violence, meanwhile, is notably less egregious in the prequel series than in “Thrones.”
Former co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the first “Dragon” season that it “pulls back” from sex, but that they also “don’t shy away from it” — as “violence perpetrated on women by men in that time … “shouldn’t be downplayed.”
Cooke finds the anguish of her character’s crumbling friendship with Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) just as engrossing since the two royals grew up together as best friends — only for the scheme-laden world of politics to pull them apart.
“They practiced proper adult relationships on each other,” Cook told Elle. “When you break up with a friend, it’s so much more heartbreaking than breaking up with a lover a lot of the time, because they know every single part of you, and it’s so much more vulnerable.”
The Season 2 premiere of “House of the Dragon” is now available on Max.
