HBO's Game of Thrones prequel series, House of the Dragon, returned for its second season this week, and the premiere revealed that Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) and Lord Commander of the Kingsguard Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel) had begun to engage in an illicit affair.
We see a couple of sex scenes involving these characters over the course of the episode, but Cooke has now revealed that a far more graphic and "animalistic" sequence ended up being cut by co-creator Ryan Condol because he felt it didn't advance the story or develop the characters in any meaningful way.
“It was messy as f*ck. It wasn’t beautiful, and that was really fun to do,” Cooke tells Elle Magazine. “I think Ryan said we weren’t learning any more about the characters, which I disagree with slightly, but it’s OK. It’s his show.”
Cooke goes on to reveal that she worked closely with the show's intimacy coordinator, Vanessa Coffey, but went in thinking she was going to be required to film more nude/sex scenes given Game of Thrones' reputation.
“I thought there’d be way more, and so I’m relieved that when it has been used for me, it’s showing Alicent being pleasured, which is amazing and doesn’t feel gratuitous,” she says. “It feels like we’re telling a story.”
Max recently released a "Weeks Ahead" trailer (see below) to give us some idea of what to expect from the rest of the season, and it seems we may see a rift start to form between Alicent and Cole as the Dance of the Dragons commences.
"The prequel series finds the Targaryen dynasty at the absolute apex of its power, with more than 15 dragons under their yoke. Most empires—real and imagined—crumble from such heights. In the case of the Targaryens, their slow fall begins almost 193 years before the events of Game of Thrones, when King Viserys Targaryen breaks with a century of tradition by naming his daughter Rhaenyra heir to the Iron Throne. But when Viserys later fathers a son, the court is shocked when Rhaenyra retains her status as his heir, and seeds of division sow friction across the realm."
House of the Dragon season 2 sees Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy, Eve Best, Steve Toussaint, Fabien Frankel, Ewan Mitchell, Tom Glynn-Carney, Sonoya Mizuno, and Rhys Ifans reprise their respective roles. Additional returning cast includes Harry Collett, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell, Phia Saban, Jefferson Hall, and Matthew Needham.
The directors for the new season are Alan Taylor (Episodes 1 & 4), Clare Kilner (Episodes 2 & 5), Geeta Patel (Episodes 3 & 8), Andrij Parekh (Episode 6), and Loni Peristere (Episode 7).