Olivia Cooke, the House of the Dragon actress who made Alicent human and paid for it

Olivia Cooke

Photo: Patrick.suechan / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 27, 1993 Oldham, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Ready Player One, Sound of Metal, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Olivia Cooke once said the stage embarrassed her. The big gestures of theatre, the projection to the back row, felt false to a young actor who had learned the job in front of cameras, and she told interviewers early on that television suited her better. Now she is about to walk onto a West End stage, open a sealed envelope and perform a play she has never read, in front of a paying audience, with no director and no rehearsal. White Rabbit Red Rabbit only works if the actor arrives unprepared. For someone who has spent years being told by strangers exactly who she is, that sounds less like a risk than a release.

The strangers mostly know her as Alicent Hightower, the queen at the centre of House of the Dragon, a woman who backs her son’s claim against her childhood friend and spends every season since justifying it. Cooke plays her as someone holding a posture she cannot afford to drop, and that restraint is exactly what makes some viewers furious. People stop her in the street for a photograph, she told GQ Hype, and then tell her how much they hate her character, sometimes in words that cannot be printed. Her answer is usually a laugh and an offer: they can delete the picture.

The voice that audiences now hear as courtly English started out in Oldham, in Greater Manchester, where Cooke was born on 27 December 1993. She began acting at eight at the Oldham Theatre Workshop, an after-school programme in her hometown, went to Royton and Crompton Academy, found a local agent at fourteen and played Maria in a college production of West Side Story. She reached the final round of auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was turned down. Her agent had already argued that drama school was unnecessary, because the work was coming anyway.

It came quickly. In 2012 she appeared in three BBC mini-series productions, among them Blackout, as the daughter of Christopher Eccleston’s character, and The Secret of Crickley Hall. The horror film The Quiet Ones, shot that year, would not reach cinemas until 2014. An audition tape sent to Los Angeles then turned into her first American role: Emma Decody in Bates Motel, A&E’s contemporary prequel to Psycho, opposite Freddie Highmore. The producers made Emma Mancunian, which Cooke first read as a hedge against her accent, and she stayed with the series until it ended in 2017.

Horror paid the early bills. The Signal opened at Sundance, and Ouija, which critics dismissed, became a box-office hit of roughly $102 million worldwide. What changed the direction was Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, for which she shaved her head to play Rachel, a teenager with leukaemia; the film won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance. Over the next few years she moved through Thoroughbreds, a cold-blooded thriller with Anya Taylor-Joy and the late Anton Yelchin, Steven Spielberg‘s Ready Player One, where she played Art3mis, and ITV’s Vanity Fair, in which she gave Becky Sharp an appetite that never apologises for itself. Sound of Metal, opposite Riz Ahmed, premiered at Toronto in 2019 with Cooke as Lou, the girlfriend who has to let a drummer go.

Her career has a pattern that flatters the ensembles more than the solo bets. The films she carried alone have had a harder time: Ouija made money while reviewers panned it, and smaller lead roles in Pixie, in the science-fiction romance Little Fish, which she also executive produced opposite Jack O’Connell, and in Naked Singularity reached far fewer people than the machines around her. The parts that made her name sit inside someone else’s engine. Alicent is the sharpest case. The role asks her to be the least sympathetic person in a room full of dragons, and she has made the character’s fear legible enough that some viewers treat the actress as an accomplice. In the same interview she described a fandom with a streak of misogyny and racism, and said the celebrity side of the job had grown into something monstrous; she had already deleted her Instagram before the third season arrived. “I don’t want this to come across as ‘Woe is me’, because I’m very grateful for the job,” she said. The complaint is not about the work, only about absorbing the rest of it in silence.

The cost also showed up in her body. Late last year, while staying in New York, she caught shingles, and the illness kept her off work for about six months, until June. She has tied it to two years of “jobs, jobs, jobs” and a burnout she did not choose to stop for: “Your body has a way of flooring you to make sure that you do actually lie down.” For two months, she said, she could not manage small talk. She spent the break at home in London, cooking a different meal every day and sorting out her cupboards, which she described, half-mortified, as living like a real housewife.

The work, meanwhile, kept arriving on schedule. In 2025 she led The Girlfriend for Prime Video as Cherry, the young woman Robin Wright‘s character is convinced is wrong for her son. The third season of House of the Dragon premiered on HBO in June 2026. In September, Apple TV brought back Sid Baker, the MI5 agent Slow Horses had left for dead after its first season, and launched the show’s sixth season with a world premiere at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto. October brought A Talent for Murder, Anton Corbijn’s film of Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Switzerland, with Helen Mirren as Patricia Highsmith, Alden Ehrenreich alongside her and Cooke as Clementine Balfour; it reaches cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 20 November.

Away from sets, she lives in London and is in a relationship with the actor Ralph Davis, her co-star in House of the Dragon, which the couple made public in 2025.

Two horror films are waiting further down the line. Visitation, directed by Nicolas Pesce, with Cooke as Sister Bernadette, is finished, and Brides, Chloe Okuno’s feature for Neon, is in post-production with her as Sally Bishop. Before either, there is the envelope. On 23 November she gives her single performance of Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit at the Duchess Theatre, a play that has passed from actor to actor for fifteen years precisely because nobody can prepare for it. The girl from Oldham who found the stage embarrassing will read her lines for the first time in public, and nobody in the stalls will know more about the next page than she does.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, Steven Spielberg, house of the dragon, Slow Horses, Helen Mirren, Olivia Cooke, A Talent for Murder, Ready Player One

Related People

Margot Robbie

Judd Tully

Kim Hyun-joo

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Sophie Thatcher

Nanni Moretti