1 of 5 | Olivia Cooke’s “House of the Dragon” Season 3 airs Sunday nights. Photo courtesy of HBO
Olivia Cooke says her House of the Dragon character Alicent Hightower is emotionally stunned by the execution of her manipulative father, Otto (Rhys Ifans), in Season 3.
Set about 100 years before the events of Game of Thrones, the show picked up this season with Alicent surrendering her sons’ rights to the crown in favor of their older half-sister and Alicent’s former best friend, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy).
One of Rhaenyra’s first moves as queen is to publicly behead Otto, the man she blames for the coup against her.
New episodes of the fantasy drama air Sundays on HBO.
“It’s devastating to not have Rhys in my daily life, so I’ll be more devastated not to have him on set. As for Alicent, when she sees him slain on the floor? She hasn’t heard from him for a very long time and, so, she doesn’t know where he’s been, and she’s wondering, ‘Has Rhaenyra imprisoned him and has she brought him out to sort of do her most showy political act as the new ruler?'” Cooke, 32, told UPI in a recent Zoom round-table interview with reporters.
“So, it’s twofold. There’s a great mourning that happens. But there is also a lot of anger in the shocking, incredibly disrespectful way that was done.”
Freddie Fox, 37, who plays Alicent’s big brother, Gwayne, is also grieving the loss of his father, but for different reasons.
“Gwayne has a very complex relationship with the idea of his father because he never really knew him and, yet, I think that’s an idea of kind of hero worship and lionization of him and what he stands for, what he could have been and, then, also kind of an inertia, really, around the idea he never actually got to know him and kind of abandoned him,” Fox said.
“So, I think the news is deeply saddening and, yet, also bleh. There’s a bleh quality to it.”
Cooke said Alicent didn’t make the decision to let Rhaenyra kill her badly disfigured son Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) as part of their peace treaty.
“She has sort of weighed up all the offers she actually could have made to Rhaenyra and I think she tried to give sort offers that had lesser personal stakes, but she knew that she had to offer Aegon’s head because that’s the only way people transfer their loyalty to Rhaenyra,” she explained.
“I think it was a very, very long horse ride back to Westeros to contemplate what she’s done.”
While Alicent and Rhaenyra plot out the future of the kingdom, Gwayne is on the battlefield with Alicent’s lover Criston (Fabien Frankel) awaiting orders.
“I’ve got to keep on this path of survival for myself and for [my daughter] Helaena and try and bring the terms of this bargain to fruition. It was exhausting,” she laughed.
Fox added, “We hope that there’s still something to live for and then when we hear the news about King’s Landing having fallen, it comes like a sort of a wave.
“We then have to try and muddle through, having very, very different personalities in very different ways of wanting to approach this sort of catatonic-making news. It causes great friction between the two of us. How can it not?”
This season also introduces James Norton as Alicent and Gwayne’s cousin.
“I interact with him a great deal and James Norton is fantastic in this part, really amazing,” Fox said.
“He seizes it with both hands and his teeth and he is someone who Gwayne has a lot of prior history with, a lot of it based on, I’d say, bullying, probably, and, yet, a kind of tacit respect for each other’s intelligence and they both try and exert their influence over another new character,” he added.
“I don’t know whether I can spoil it, probably not, so I won’t. But there’s another character who comes into the story and is of great importance to them both and they both have this very set vision about what this person should be doing and I think my vision is better.”
The hunger for power weighs heavily. A new episode of #HOTD premieres TONIGHT. pic.twitter.com/xm2phTDwCL— House of the Dragon (@HouseofDragon) July 12, 2026
