About four months before to the commencement of filming on the Game of Thrones prequel, Emma D'Arcy and Olivia Cooke were invited to dinner at the London home of Miguel Sapochnik, who is co-showrunner on House of the Dragon with Ryan Condal. Cooke was running behind schedule when they were supposed to meet in person for the first time. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the English actress from Bates Motel and Ready Player One was racing back to the city from another assignment and momentarily lost herself.
"I completely forgot and just gave everyone a hug. I think everyone was like, 'Whoa!' I was like, 'Oh no! I did get tested today,'" Cooke, 28, tells EW over Zoom in June from Albany, N.Y., where she was starting to shoot yet another film. "But it was so funny that we were just like, 'Oh no, we can't hug,' even though I'm just meeting you for the first time and I'm in your house."
The remainder of the meal went much more smoothly. The two performers who were cast as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (D'Arcy) and Alicent Hightower were astonished that nobody actually talked shop (Cooke). They mainly talked about their families. Cooke recalls Sapochnik and Condal mentioning that both of their children had moved to London. D'Arcy, who uses they/them pronouns, only remembers certain feelings they had at the moment and not much else.
"You know those chance meetings where there's a familiarity? For some unknown reason, I really felt that with Liv," D'Arcy, 30, explains. "It was like we had the right language to speak to each other immediately, and that doesn't always happen." Cooke agrees, "We hit it off right away." The other emotion was more of a sobering tonic. "It was the first moment where I was like, 'Oh Christ, man. This might actually happen,'" D'Arcy says of the reality of the show setting in. "We all got our offers, having never met anyone in person because it was COVID, and protocol was so tight. I hadn't met anyone new for about a year. It was a really, really surreal evening."
Before their own on-screen storm of swords began, this was the stillness.
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