Olivia Cooke disagreed with cutting an "animalistic" sex scene from House of the Dragon season 2
Regardless, everyone's still horny as hell.
Chances are you've either started watching House of the Dragon season 2 or are planning to do so. We can already say things are looking bleak for all the backstabbing royals involved, and of course, problematic sexual encounters continue to be a recurring thing. But it seems that we won't be seeing some of the messier stuff that was shot.
The key cast members of the first Game of Thrones spinoff series have been out there doing interviews and big promotional bits for weeks now, and Olivia Cooke's in-depth chat with Elle might be one of the meatiest pieces on the subject you can read right now.
While the entire interview isn't centered on the Game of Thrones prequel, it understandably shapes most of it. About the pressure of tackling the first-ever GoT spinoff series, Cooke said: "There was a pressure [in] doing a new offshoot of the Game of Thrones world, and really desperately wanting it to be well-received because we’d worked so hard on it." Following the backlash to the last season of the main series back in 2019, anyone would have been nervous going into such an important franchise and toying with its past.
Understandably, she also felt nervous about the amount of attention any big actor attached to Westeros attracts: "I was worried about having lots of eyes on me, but it’s actually been okay. It sort of ramps up when the show comes out, and things just die back down again." Despite her positive experience so far, she also explained that she hasn't enjoyed every House of the Dragon-adjacent meme out there.
As for the harder work that went into season two, which she describes as a far smoother experience now that she and her co-stars weren't newcomers, it appears a wild sex scene that landed closer to Game of Thrones' most striking was cut because the creatives felt it wasn't adding to the plot or characters. "I think Ryan [Condal, the showrunner] said we weren’t learning any more about the characters, which I disagree with slightly, but it’s okay. It’s his show." According to Cooke, the more intimate scenes with Alicent Hightower, of which we already get a couple in episode one of the second season, feel "like we’re telling a story."
Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon have been criticized in the past for their handling of certain sex scenes and darker moments involving women, but there's also been a fair amount of positivity in the conversation (often coming from the performers themselves) surrounding the scenes and what they add to the story and each character's personal arc. As this show matures and cuts deeper into its messy roster of ambitious individuals, it's interesting to get some insight on how the 'more delicate' scenes were handled straight from the people involved.