She has the endurance for five seasons of Bates Motel, and the shine to carry a miniseries like ITV’s Vanity Fair. Often she’ll move from one genre to another – horror in The Quiet Ones, comedy in Thoroughbreds – and between big and small screens. Photograph: Simon Emmett/The Observerĭuring 10 years as an actor, Cooke has built a career of remarkable diversity and consistent quality, showing herself to be as capable in Spielberg-scale theatre-fillers ( Ready Player One) as Sundance sleepers ( Me and Earl and the Dying Girl). ‘I’m always trying to escape the last thing I’ve done’: Olivia Cooke wears blue leather dress and rollneck by. I’ve caught Cooke in the halcyon period (“luscious”, she calls it, her Mancunian vowels no less round for her years in North America) between finishing press and before the scrutiny turns on her. “I resist things that are popular,” she says, “but to my own detriment, because it’s really fucking good.” Until then, she’d not even seen Game of Thrones, which she chalks up to a contrarian streak. Cooke landed the role in October 2020, after an exhaustive and highly secretive audition process over Zoom. When we meet, she is just weeks out from the biggest and brightest spotlight of her career: a meaty part in Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, one of the most hotly anticipated television series in history.įrom episode six on, Cooke plays Alicent Hightower, the daughter of King Viserys I Targaryen’s righthand man and a keen political operator in her own right. Quarter-life crises are the lot of our millennial generation, but Cooke in particular could be on the cusp of major change. I hate what I become on the red carpet – so amped up and shouty Olivia Cooke “It’s escapism, isn’t it? With everything going on in the world, the future feels so uncertain.” “We’re going out more, we’re drinking more,” she says. “Lol kidding.”) She seems reassured when I tell her my summer has been much the same. (“A few days to dry out,” she captioned the party pictures on Instagram. Before that, Edinburgh for the Fringe festival. She’s just got back from a holiday in Sicily. But more than racing towards milestones she says she and her friends are regressing. “Well, I wouldn’t.”Ĭooke herself is nearly three months away from turning 29. “You wouldn’t pay to go back to 22,” she continues, with feeling. And, at 31 myself, I’m glad to let her finish the thought. She’s repeating the pep talk that she recently gave to a friend who was “panicking” about ageing another year: “32 is the new 22 – it really is,” she declares over a mid-afternoon pot of English breakfast tea. If you happen to be worried about getting older, Olivia Cooke is an excellent friend to have.
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