Warning: This article contains spoilers forHouse of the Dragonseason 1, episode 2.
Anyone who has readGeorge R.R.
“I’m so glad I can talk about this now.
Emily Carey as Alicent Hightower, King Viserys’s new bride and queen, on ‘House of the Dragon’.Ollie Upton/HBO
“It changes one of the branches of the show, if that makes sense.
It pushes things in a different direction.
And for my character it’s, of course, a massive turn.”
Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) on ‘House of the Dragon’.Ollie Upton/HBO
There were multiple ways Carey could’ve approached this moment.
Is Alicent, who’s wearing her late mother’s dress in this meeting, fearful?
Is she duty-bound to fulfill this task for her family?
Milly Alcock appears as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen on ‘House of the Dragon’.Ollie Upton/HBO
“I was like, ‘What?’
And he was like, ‘All of it.
That’s what we want.'”
She decided to play into that confusion.
‘I should be happy.
This should be what I want, but is it actually what I want?'”
In the case of Alicent, that took the form of her father orchestrating her engagement to Viserys.
Carey was admittedly nervous when she first read the script forHouse of the Dragon.
(Carey is now 19.
Considine is 48.)
How was she going to form a bond with her costar?
Considine and the showrunners made Carey feel at ease.
And the answer to that question turned out to beRuPaul’s Drag Race.
“Paddy is a massiveDrag Racefan, and so am I,” Carey mentions.
He’d be like, ‘Oh my God, yes!
Let’s talk about it.’
And so that’s how we’d start every morning."
She recalls one moment in particular while filming the premiere episode’s tourney.
Everyone was feeling a bit delirious in the face of a long shoot day.
“The stunt guys would line up to joust at the other end.
There’d be these big sweeping wide shots.
They couldn’t really hear what we were saying.
Are you ready to joust.
Life?!'”
That would be courtesy of Considine.
“It was so funny.
He was really getting into it.”
Carey now hopes to use her newfound international recognition fromHouse of the Dragonto land a guest-judge spot onDrag Race.
She says she’s already had discussions about it.
“I’ve asked, we’re talking about it.
Don’t you worry, I’m going to get there.
I’m going to make it happen,” Carey declares.
“Honestly, I think I’d just cry the whole time.
I think I would just sob the entire time.
I grew up on that show.
I loveDrag Race, and I love drag as a performance art.
I think it’s beautiful.”
Carey sees that character dynamic as a particularly strange connection.
“There’s an underlying guilt from both sides, especially when it comes to the point of marriage…
But I think they bring out a softness in one another.”
After episode 1 of the first season, some viewers picked up on possible flirtations between Alicent and Rhaenyra.
The princess also brings up her desire to travel the world with her friend on dragon-back.
As a self-identifying queer woman, Carey picked up on those undertones in the script.
She confirms it’s something she and Alcock discussed with each other.
Ultimately, it speaks more to the specificity of relationships girls can have that boys are discouraged from.
It does toe the line between platonic and romantic.
But I also think, at 14, you don’t know what those words mean.
You don’t know what the feelings mean.
It’s just love.
That’s all it is.
It’s just a beautiful bond between two young girls, let’s put it that way."
