Olivia Cooke says she feels “protective” of Alicent:
“I have to be empathetic, and I feel f*cking sorry for her. I feel she’s grown up into this patriarchal system and she’s been brainwashed by her father to honor this lineage.”
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“I do feel protective of Alicent,” says Olivia Cooke. “I have to be empathetic, and I feel fucking sorry for her. I feel she’s grown up into this patriarchal system and she’s been brainwashed by her father to honor this lineage.” She discussed interactions from fans; “They’ll take a picture, and then they’ll be like: ‘We HATE your character!’ Sometimes people do say that with a lot of malice.”
“[Alicent has] really stirred up a lot of feelings,” she says. “It’s odd to be on the receiving end of that as someone who has only ever tried to convey her with as much complexity as possible… It makes me really angry that we’re then supposed to just bow down and [pay] obeisance to these people that only want to say the most debased, hate-filled things. But thankfully, we’ve all experienced it in our own way, and we’ve got each other, which doesn’t make it right. There’s also been really wonderful interactions and I’m so glad that Emma gets as much love as they do as well, because they’re fucking fantastic and such a beautiful, wonderful human as well.”
“It’s only really getting worse,” she says discussing misogyny in the outside world. “I think about the women in Afghanistan who haven’t had the right to an education or work for years now, the rise of Andrew Tate and [prominent U.K. far-right activist] Tommy Robinson dismissing any agency or autonomy that women should have as an innate human right. Obviously, we’re so wonderful and so powerful and we’re clearly something to be envied. And they want to take away all our rights because we’re so amazing. I say that about non-binary people, trans people, about queer people in general. Despite the adversity, we are fucking incredible — and that makes straight men insane.”
