Emma D’Arcy has a “weird guilt” replacing Milly Alcock as Rhaenyra

Episode 6 is the foreshadowing of the conflict that will befall the Targaryens and all of Westeros. We are moving in a swift manner towards a full-blown civil war with the grown-up cast, thanks to the several time jumps we have been noticing since the beginning of the series. This is important because the saga of the struggle between the Greens and the Blacks spans several decades, and the time skips help get to the point in the storyline that House of The Dragon is actually based on.

Audience and critics alike have been in awe of the cast’s performance so far, and a lot of them miss the younger versions of Alicent and Rhaenyra, i.e. Emily Carey and Milly Alcock, already. Emma D’Arcy, who plays the older version of Rhaenyra and will carry on for the rest of the series, talked about the same in a recent interview with Variety.

D’Arcy said, “I think now I have a weird guilt because I’m aware that in order to come into the show, Milly’s got to leave. And that that’s going to be a pain for a lot of people, me included, frankly. We really don’t give the audience much time at all to sit with their grief.”

They also had heaps of praises for Alcock’s portrayal of Rhaenyra, “I’m feeling a bit like watching Targaryen home video or something.” D’Arcy and Cooke spent some time during rehearsal reading scenes between their characters’ younger selves that they would never film, “just to get a taste and a flavor of that more hopeful, more erotic, fizzier adolescent energy, and to know what’s lost.”

“I think most of those early, intense, adolescent friendships have an erotic edge,” they explain. “Because it’s an age where we’re trying to work out who we are and what we want and who we want to f*ck. Those are all intersecting questions.”

What did you think of Milly Alcock’s portrayal of Rhaenyra Targaryen? Tell us in the comments below!

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