For actors, it's important to do your research when you play an established character in a wildly popular franchise. That's exactly what happened to Milly Alcock who was cast as the younger version of Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon. So how did the Australian actress prepare for the role? Alcock admits to re-watching Game of Thrones which she declared to be a "clever show."
Milly Alcock recently spoke to TheWrap where she revealed that she would visit the Fire and Ice Wiki and ride her bicycle to the library for six hours a day just to study George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire publications. Alcock also took instructions from a dialect coach and read anything she could find in Rhaenyra’s accent. Amazingly the young actress confessed that she created “big graphs of all the Houses and all the rankings within the Houses.”
Perhaps the most important thing that Alcock did to get ready for House of the Dragon is to rewatch Game of Thrones, which came out when she was only 11 years old. After watching the series, she admitted that she was impressed with how the original show worked.
“It’s just such a clever show. No one is safe. And I think that that is something that audiences aren’t given a lot of the time,” Alcock said. “We kind of have this in the back of our mind like, ‘Oh, they’re not going to kill off the main character.’ … It’s like, ‘No, Game of Thrones really likes to flip that on its head; that’s why I loved it. I was like, ‘No one is safe.’ It exceeded my expectations every time.”
Perhaps the same thing can be said about House of the Dragon but we're not too worried about Alcock's character just yet. There's a huge chance that Rhaenyra will survive, at least until the end of the first season.
House of the Dragon Episode 3 is titled Second of His Name and will premiere on HBO on Sunday, September 4, 2022.
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