House of the Dragon’s Olivia Cooke and Fabien Frankel Talk ‘Incredibly Repressed’ Alicent and Criston’s Risqué New Arrangement — Watch

Warning: This post contains spoilers for House of the Dragon‘s Season 2 premiere.

When House of the Dragon‘s Season 2 premiere first checks in with Alicent, the dowager queen is having a very intimate moment with Ser Criston Cole, lord commander of the Kingsguard. Immediately afterward, she informs him that “we cannot again,” and he agrees. But by the end of the hour, we see the knight — sans armor (and everything else) — in her bed. (Read a full recap.)

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Naturally, when TVLine spoke with series stars Olivia Cooke, who plays Alicent, and Fabien Frankel, who plays Criston, we wanted their take on the tryst.

“I think, initially, it’s teenage for Alicent,” Cooke says in the video at the top of the post, sitting in between Frankel and their co-star, Matt Smith. “She’s never allowed herself to act on the feelings that she has. She was in a pretty passionless marriage. Now, her body is doing things that she didn’t think it was capable of.”

Still, with the newfound ecstasy comes “a great amount of shame for her,” she adds. Frankel says Cole’s going through something similar.

Noting that both characters are “incredibly repressed,” he imagines that the sex is, “in some ways like a relief for the both of them” as well as something that “drives you… in life to make decisions that you might not make or put yourself in situations that you might not be in.”

Press PLAY on the video at the top of the post to hear more of Cooke’s and Frankel’s thoughts on the hook-up — including what Rhaenyra does or doesn’t have to do with it — then hit the comments: Are you on board with this new Red Keep development?

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