Talk about drama, queens.
In the Season 2 finale of “House of the Dragon,” Alicent Hightower (played by Olivia Cooke) and Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) made a secret pact for a relatively bloodless takeover of King’s Landing. Which is all well and good, but now that Season 3 is nearly upon us, can the former friends’ plan hold?
“I mean, I think it is hard for Rhaenyra to trust Alicent,” D’Arcy tells TVLine in the video above. “Their history is a complicated one. That said, there is such momentum, I think, in Rhaenyra’s campaign at this point, really for the first time. She is in a strong military, strategic position, and the Greens’ defeat seems all but certain, certainly extremely possible, extremely likely.”
And that sense of strength, D’Arcy adds, also solidifies Rhaenyra’s belief “that she has a divine mandate to rule. So Alicent effectively bending the knee also feels fated. There’s almost a confirmation bias to that momentum.”
Alicent ‘doesn’t have a choice’
And Alicent? “I think she doesn’t have a choice,” Olivia Cooke says in the video above. “That’s all she’s got, you know, this promise at the moment. And I think she’s just banking on a shared history, you know, like a shared girlhood together.”
Viewers will recall that, when Alicent came to see Rhaenyra at Dragonstone, she claimed to want to live a life “free of all of this endless plotting and striving.” Her plan: When Aemond goes to meet Cole in the Riverlands, Alicent will have Helaena — who’ll be the de facto ruler at that point — order the guards to lay down their arms and open the gates to King’s Landing. And when Rhaenyra points out that for the plan to work, she’ll have to kill Aegon, Alicenta agrees (though obviously, she’s not happy about it).
The way forward is ambitious, and it hinges on a bunch of factors falling in line in succession; both the Green queen and the woman who play her know that the situation is tenuous at best. “Yeah, it’s very flimsy,” Cooke continues. “She’s just got to have so much faith in that, and be quite blinkered, as she tries to keep up her end of the bargain, as well.”
“House of the Dragon” returns for Season 3 on Sunday, June 21, at 9/8c on HBO and HBO Max. Press PLAY on the video at the top of the post to hear D’Arcy and Cooke — as well as their co-stars Steve Toussaint, Abubakar Salim, Tom Glynn-Carney, Kieran Bew, Clinton Liberty, and Tom Bennett — give us a sense of what’s ahead this season in Westeros.
