TV’s Hottest Fantasy Actor Saved Her Career By Botching Star Wars Audition

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 2 seconds ago

If you’re a fan of HBO’s House of the Dragon, you sometimes have to defend yourself to your more skeptical friends. If yours are anything like mine, they’ll start asking you some hard questions, like, “After Game of Thrones got so bad, why the heck would you come back for another show?” I give them all kinds of answers, of course. Sometimes, I tell them that this show is like GoT before it fell off; other times, I tell them that I’m just invested in the mythology of Westeros. While these are both true to some extent, the main reason I watch is much simpler: hot ladies in fantasy clothing!

One great example of this is Olivia Cooke. In House of the Dragon, she plays an important character: Alicent Hightower, a queen whose crumbling relationship with Rhaenyra Targaryen leads to civil war. Cooke is absolutely mesmerizing in the role, imbuing charisma and pathos to a character who makes one bad decision after another. Beneath her character’s regal bearing, she wears the effervescent beauty of the girl next door. However, we came very close to never having Cooke appear in House of the Dragon at all. In a recent interview, she admitted how close she came to getting a very different role: Rey in The Force Awakens!

From Sci-Fi To Fantasy

Recently, Olivia Cooke offered an interview to Josh Horowitz on his Happy Sad Confused podcast. There, she spoke about a wide range of topics before her host brought up something very specific. Horowitz asked her if there was any truth to the rumor that she had auditioned for a role in The Last Jedi, the controversial Star Wars film. Cooke busted this “weird rumor” before dropping some truly shocking news. While she didn’t audition for TLJ, she did audition for The Force Awakens. And not just for any role: she auditioned for Rey, the main character of the entire Sequel trilogy!

The House of the Dragon star was very self-deprecating during the interview. She confirmed that “I did audition a few times for the other one, where Daisy Ridley got [it]” before downplaying the significance of her audition. “But you know, everyone and their dog auditioned for that,” she said. She then got very candid about how she did when auditioning for the most popular sci-fi franchise in the world. “I think I auditioned once in L.A., and then once with J.J. [Abrams]. And I was sh*t. I was really bad,” she said.

Everything’s Coming Up Olivia

Does Olivia Cooke have any sour grapes over not getting the highly coveted role? Not really. During the interview, she drove home both how bad her audition performance was and how good Ridley’s was. “You know when you go into an audition, and you’re just not bringing it, and you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let everyone down in the room?” she asked rhetorically. “Daisy did such an amazing job, I just wasn’t that kind of an actor at that time. It just wasn’t a fit.” Fortunately, things worked out: she landed parts in other high-profile films like Ready Player One, eventually getting the part of Alicent Hightower in House of the Dragon.

In retrospect, things really worked out for this talented actor. As it is, she’s a major player in one of the biggest and most popular shows ever made. Had she won the part of Rey in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, her career might very well have suffered the same way that Daisy Ridley’s has: starring in one forgettable film after another, just waiting for Lucasfilm to give her a call back. But Olivia Cooke is absolutely thriving in a career-defining role that gives “fantasy girl” a new meaning. Will of the Force or will of the Seven? Either way, Cooke was clearly destined for greatness!