Olivia Cooke: ‘There aren’t a lot of working-class actors’

Photograph by Suki Dhanda

Since then, in short, she has. You might recognise Cooke from her TV roles, like Sidonie “Sid” Baker in the first season of Apple’s beloved espionage series Slow Horses, or films, from Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One to the critically acclaimed Sound of Metal, released in 2020. But she’s probably best known now for playing Alicent Hightower (Queen, second wife of King Viserys I Targaryen) in the mega-budget Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. That role in that franchise brought a level of exposure that Cooke wasn’t exactly prepared for. “The size of that show,” she says, “in terms of the eyes on it is incomprehensible.” Spin-offs, even of telly juggernauts, don’t always work. This, however, has proved to be a major success for HBO. “We’re like a cover band that has got really popular, it’s like Noasis charting.” In part thanks to the scale of that series, in part because of her creative versatility, Cooke is quietly becoming one of the most sought after British actors of her generation.

It’s a sticky midsummer’s day in east London when we meet at a café, made even stickier by the open pizza oven, which makes me look/feel like a sweaty blancmange. Not Cooke. She breezes in nonplussed and orders a herbal tea. She’s about to fly to Majorca for a holiday, her first break in over a year, and doesn’t want to get ill beforehand. “But I can already feel it,” she complains. “My body knows that, come Saturday, it’s going to be on a sun lounger.”

Before that, we’re talking The Girlfriend, a new psychological thriller series from Amazon in which Cooke stars. It’s an adaptation of Michelle Frances’s hit novel, and Cooke plays said girlfriend – Cherry – alongside Robin Wright (of House of Cards fame). Cherry is inscrutable: ambitious, magnetic and driven, but also devious. “She goes about things in very morally wonky ways,” says Cooke. And she’s proud of the work. Not that Cooke has actually seen it. “I can’t bring myself to watch it,” she says. “Sitting down to watch it in my own home, where I can’t escape, is like torture.” Why? I ask. Would she unpick her performance? Fear her northern accent seeping into Cherry’s London lilt? “Yeah,” she replies. “Or I’d just be watching the acne migrate around my face for the third time.”

Blemishes aside, her performance balances innocent girl-next-door with Machiavellian master manipulator. Despite her character’s borderline psychopathic tendencies, Cooke found Cherry almost disconcertingly easy to inhabit. “I’m quite good at it,” she laughs. “I find anger quite hard to access in myself, so getting that outlet through my work is cathartic. I’d come home [after shooting] and find my shoulders had dropped.” Cherry is a shrewd observer and imitator of those around her and Cooke, it seems, is the same. During our hour-long conversation, she drops into all sorts of accents: fast-paced Californian; a clipped, posh English; and her four-year-old nephew’s Mancunian.

“Cherry reminds me of people I grew up with. She’s bullish about getting what she wants… a young woman with nothing to fall back on.” She pauses. “I’m quite a pushover, so I admire that.”

Cooke didn’t have family connections to give her a leg up in the industry. She grew up in Oldham, just outside Manchester, the daughter of a retired policeman and a sales rep. Her early interest in drama was nurtured through a programme at the Oldham Theatre Workshop – the type of place that is now having its funding “ripped out, left, right and centre,” she laments. “It was so formative for me, not even just for the career I’m in now,” she recalls. “For my character development and personality development, it was a safe space to be as freaky and weird and nerdy or whatever as I wanted to be. I really don’t know who I would be, if I hadn’t had such a soft, embracing environment.”

“I was never the lead in any of the plays we did,” she continues. “I didn’t really have high hopes for myself.” It’s harder, Cooke believes, for someone who is “unconnected and from a lower socio-economic background to gain strides in this industry”. At times, she’s felt an outsider. “There aren’t a lot of working-class actors, it’s all about who you know, what your parents did, what drama school you went to, what school you went to…” Even when you do succeed, she feels, it’s questioned: “There’s always judgment when someone from a more working-class background does well for themselves. It’s never really queried when you’re from a middle or upper-class background.” And then there’s the entitlement of her more privileged peers. Cooke remembers working with an actor from an affluent background once, who turned to her on set and moaned: “Ugh, I hate lines.” Cooke remains incandescent. “You’re a fucking actor! It’s the one thing that’s required of you!” She shrugs. “I think I hold a lot of chips on my shoulder and a lot of resentment.”

Cooke applied for a place at Rada when she was 18, but was rejected. “It didn’t sting,” she thinks, “because the day I got my rejection letter, I got a call saying I’d got the lead in a film.” It was the horror movie The Quiet Ones. “I could feel the train tracks changing.” It wasn’t long before her life felt as if it was playing out in fast-forward. She relocated to New York aged 21, then spent years hopping between there, Vancouver and Los Angeles while filming multiple series. For the next seven years she was constantly on the go. “I was so career-focused back then and I didn’t really have a base,” she says. “All my friends were here and I didn’t have many people around me. I was really lonely and quite ill.” She felt she had to keep going: “Who am I to say no? This was my dream come true and I had nothing else to fall back on.”

Navigating the distance from home, and the industry itself, was challenging. The move Stateside was the first time she’d lived away from her mum’s house. She subsisted almost exclusively on tuna pasta for a period of years. “It was a real awakening into adulthood. I realise now just how young I was,” she says. “In your early 20s, it’s like being on a rollercoaster while trying to do mascara. It’s a tough, lonely life, especially when you don’t have the tools to look after yourself. It wasn’t much more than a decade ago, but self-care wasn’t really in our vocabulary.” She pauses. “You unpack it later down the road in therapy,” she says, “when you’re like, ‘What is this malaise that I feel all the time?’”

This was when she got her first taste of Hollywood – a bitter taste, occasionally. Take the time she auditioned for a live-action Disney movie, and the director stood over her, camera in hand, yelling: “Be more magic! Just be more magic!” It remains a mystery to Cooke what exactly he was hoping she’d conjure up. “I’ve had bad direction before, but that was just amorphous and intangible,” she laughs. “How can you be more magic? Could you maybe just put this tape into post-production and make my skin sparkle?”

Cooke eventually moved back to the UK just after her 26th birthday, when the Covid pandemic struck. “Overnight, I felt way more centred and lighter,” she says. Despite her years living in the US, it never felt like home. “I’m a British girl who just loves a pub and a good hill walk.” Today, she lives in London in a wood-panelled house she described in Architectural Digest as feeling like an “old cigar-slash-70s shag pad” where she’s surrounded by her closest friends (her “great loves”). “I feel like I was on a kind of pilgrimage from 18 to 26, so it’s been nice to settle. I can feel my feet growing roots.”

To match her newly sedate life, Cooke’s pastimes are also low-key. Her current light reading is a nonfiction book about how Old Norse influenced Old English, which helps her escape (“I read a lot of history books”), or else she’s watching The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. “When my mum calls and asks what I’m doing, I say, ‘I’m just checking in with the girlies.’”

We extract ourselves from the heat of the café and wander up towards the local park (it’s the wrong direction for her, but she insists that my getting to nursery pickup on time is of the utmost importance). Before Cooke hops on a Lime bike into town for her next meeting, she considers how much has changed over the past five years. “I feel settled and calmer now,” she says. “I’ve got my place here – I don’t feel like such a weathervane any more.” 

The Girlfriend will be available on Amazon from 10 September

Image by Alamy