Don’t mess with Olivia Cooke.
The House of the Dragon star recalls a time she slapped a co-star on the HBO drama so hard she made him cry.
The 31-year-old actress — who’s currently promoting her Prime Video thriller The Girlfriend — told British newspaper The i Paper about a Dragon scene she worked on with Tom Glynn-Carney. In the show, Cooke plays the regal Alicent Hightower and Glynn-Carney is her sniveling son, King Aegon Targaryen.
The scene called for Alicent to slap Aegon and Glynn-Carney encouraged the actress do “do it for real.” After consulting with the stunt coordinator, who gave her permission, Cooke whacked him – hard.
“I walloped him!” she recalled “I don’t know my own strength! It was a slap that resonated across the land! It made him cry! I mean, that was the reaction that he’d wanted for the cameras. But I felt awful. It was hideous. I’ve always felt sick and wanted to cry after doing any stunt work like that.”
Far more seriously, Cooke also says that as much as Hollywood has progressed when it comes to shooting sex scenes in movies and TV shows, women are often still put into difficult positions on set.
Cooke said actors are put into “really precarious and vulnerable situations” which are even worse for actors who are “just starting out and don’t have the vocabulary to say what they’re not comfortable with” and noted “women [will] often get labelled ‘difficult’ or ‘a bitch’ for speaking up” about their concerns.
Cooke added that intimacy coordinators — which first widely introduced into the TV industry on HBO’s Game of Thrones — will “sense hesitation and become your voice” and advocate for the actor.
“Showing intimacy, passion is an integral part of reflecting the human experience,” Cooke added, but that it should be accomplished on screen without feeling like “a chunk of yourself has been taken.”
The third season of House of the Dragon is expected sometime next year, likely around the summer. Meanwhile, Cooke can be seen in The Girlfriend, a six-episode psychological thriller that stars Robin Wright as a mother whose life begins to unravel when her son (Laurie Davidson) brings home a manipulative new girlfriend (Cooke). The series premieres Wednesday on Amazon’s Prime Video.