Drama Actress Roundtable: Jennifer Coolidge, Dominique Fishback, Jennifer Garner, Emma D’Arcy & More
Written by Admin on June 24 2023
Hollywood Reporter: The THR Drama Actress Roundtable
Written by Admin on June 24 2023
Clare Danes, Emma D’Arcy, Jennifer Garner and Melanie Lynskey also join the discussion about giving notes, the roles they’re not offered and the problem of a public life: “The loss of just being able to smile at someone on the street and say ‘hello’ as yourself is a real intense thing.”
Before cameras rolled at THR’s Drama Actress Emmy Roundtable, Jennifer Garner turned to Jennifer Coolidge and asked whether she’d be returning for The White Lotus season three. It was an innocent question and an instant giveaway that the Last Thing He Told Me star had yet to see the season two finale, in which (spoiler!) Coolidge’s character takes a header off a boat and drowns. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Coolidge filled her in. “Nooo!” Garner shrieked in response. But before she could pepper Coolidge with follow-ups, the more formal discussion between the two and their fellow performers — Dominique Fishback (Swarm), Melanie Lynskey (Yellowjackets, The Last of Us), Emma D’Arcy (House of the Dragon) and Claire Danes (Fleishman Is in Trouble) — began. Over the course of an hour, the sextet got candid about navigating the Hollywood system, paparazzi cameras and gender norms.
If a fan approaches you on the street, what do you typically hear?
EMMA D’ARCY I get asked if I’m me because I look quite different in real life, which actually presents a possible out because there’s a temptation to say, “No, but I get that all the time.”
Emma, I was sure you were going to say something about a Negroni [after their drink of choice became a meme]. How often do you have people buying you one, and have you reached the point where you’d just prefer a beer?
D’ARCY I got sent a lot and you know, it makes a lovely gift. (Laughter.) But there was a period where I was desperate for a lager.
Emma, you were signing on to one of TV’s biggest franchises — did that give you any pause?
D’ARCY I wrote a pros and cons list during the auditions process. The big one on the cons list was loss of anonymity, but probably that was a way of writing self-hate or something. Then I auditioned [via self-tape] for three months during the pandemic after losing a year of work, so in some ways, I think my hands were tied. Halfway through the process, the then-showrunner, Miguel Sapochnik, called to ask me if I owned a wig. A proper person would’ve asked someone who does hair for advice.
Deadline: ‘House Of The Dragon’ Stars On The Targaryen Family Secrets
Written by Admin on June 14 2023
Emma D’Arcy was feeling like a bit of a cheat. It was July of 2022 at the world premiere of House of the Dragon in Los Angeles. Stylishly dressed in an oversized suit and drop earrings, D’Arcy worked the red carpet like an old pro but never felt completely at ease among the hundreds of eager fans who packed the Academy Museum theater. “It’s like finding yourself in someone else’s life,” recalls the actor, who plays Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen in the HBO drama that’s based on George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood. “It’s quite wild having never done that before, and certainly not on that scale, obviously, with one of the biggest shows in the world. And I am quite camera shy, which is obviously a disaster.”
But when the lights went down and the Game of Thrones theme music filled the theater, D’Arcy’s anxiety was replaced by an inescapable euphoria. “We were so thrilled because we heard initially how they were sort of holding their cards close to their chests about what the theme would be,” says the actor. “I sort of felt like, ‘come on, you cowards, use the music!’ Like, put your money where your mouth is. It’s embarrassing, but when I used to watch Game of Thrones when it was on TV, I got chills every time. I would never skip the titles, you know? They were so good. So good.”
Though it’s impossible to continue the Westeros franchise without featuring various towheads, dragons and that indelible title music, Martin and co-creator Ryan Condal weren’t looking to straight-up copy what David Benioff and D.B. Weiss achieved over eight, Emmy-winning seasons on Game of Thrones. Rather, their goal was to tell more of an intimate family story that takes place 172 years before the birth of Daenerys (played in Thrones by Emilia Clarke) by focusing on three main characters within the House Targaryen — the reluctant King Viserys (Paddy Considine), who ends up marrying Alicent (Olivia Cooke), the best friend of his daughter Rhaenyra whom he dubbed the heir apparent to the throne. Add in a reckless uncle named Daemon (Matt Smith) who falls hard for his brother’s dragon-riding daughter, and you’ve got a jam-packed first season full of treachery, incest and familial violence.
“The trick was really to show this generational conflict that began with Viserys’s generation,” said Condal at Deadline’s Contenders event. (Because of the WGA strike, Condal would not do interviews for this story). “Viserys and his hand Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) passed it down to their children, Rhaenyra and Alicent, who were young women and used as pawns in the game of thrones. And then as they grew up and became adults and had children of their own, and this bitter rivalry and grasp for power gets passed on to their children. So it’s a three-generational story and we needed to get through that in the course of one season.”
That meant beginning the prequel with two younger actresses playing Rhaenyra and Alicent — a risky proposition that meant switching out actresses Milly Alcock and Emily Carey for D’Arcy and Cooke halfway through the 10-episode season and possibly raising fan ire (which ended up happening since Alcock, in particular, was so well-liked).
“It’s rarely done,” admitted Cooke to Deadline in 2022. “I think while watching it, I felt more pressure than when I actually filmed it. It never felt like we were replacing the others. It just felt like the first five episodes were a sort of a time capsule.”
Fortunately, Cooke and D’Arcy never felt a need to constantly share notes with their younger counterparts to maintain some continuity in their roles. “There was no laying down of the law for Rhaenyra. I also didn’t feel like that was necessary,” D’Arcy says. “I think something that’s so nice about how the first series is constructed is that it does give sort of a tangible distance from one’s childhood. I definitely feel my childhood self to be quite separate from me and I can sort of see the edges of the person that I was as a child in a way that I’m not as good at seeing my edges now. I loved how that was literalized in the show. It was also just a huge honor because Millie is such a brilliant actor, and it was very lovely to come in after they’ve taken care so beautifully in the first five episodes. It was a very generous springboard for me and Olivia, I think.”
British Vogue: In House Of The Dragon, Emma D’Arcy Is Reshaping Westeros. Off Screen, They’re Reshaping Hollywood
Written by Admin on June 13 2023
If you were at Trans Pride in London in 2021, you might have spotted Emma D’Arcy amongst the thousands of protesters. Picture it, D’Arcy – alabaster wig-free – sitting with a friend watching post-march revellers dance in the fading dusk of a summer’s evening:
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” one of them says to D’Arcy. “Such a powerful feeling – what is that?”
They stop to think, and then suddenly realise: “Oh, it’s pride.”
“It was genuinely remarkable,” D’Arcy remembers, “a feeling adjacent to, but different from, joy”. Today, on this gloomy afternoon, the nonbinary London-born actor is perched thoughtfully in a chair with the hood of their oversized denim hoodie up, silver hoop earrings occasionally winking in the light. “I think part of what I was reacting to was the process of converting otherness to exquisite difference.”
D’Arcy, the breakout talent of HBO’s ambitious Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon, is a very different kind of Hollywood star – more likely to describe the Golden Globes as the “prom of a school you didn’t go to” and go wild swimming (“along with, you know, all of northeast London”) than get swept up in the momentum of a cultural juggernaut with a reported budget of $20 million an episode. And yet, here they are: possibly one of the hottest actors on the planet right now, one who’s also single-handedly responsible for a 5,640 per cent increase in Google searches for “negroni sbagliato”.
Even though D’Arcy’s tender moment at Trans Pride – they’ve been three years running now – is enough to leave us temporarily choked up, D’Arcy willingly admits that they find it hard to articulate their thoughts at present. They nervously toke on a vape, before duly putting it away for the rest of the interview (“don’t vape, kids”). “It’s not a good time, is it?” they sigh, unscrewing the cap of a battered Chilly’s and taking a generous swig. “In the last couple of years, transphobia has become just broadly more acceptable.” Then a flash of that debonair charm, the one that had people swooning at the mere mention of a certain cocktail (with Prosecco in it): “I tell you what though, the ‘gender critical’ title took me by surprise. I thought I was the one who was critical of gender!”
