Bizarre Age Fact About Alicent and Aegon Actors That Proves Time Jumps Make No Sense
Seriously, why would they even age those characters up?
The House of the Dragon story is quite stretched in time, which is why the showrunners decided to replace several young actors with older ones. Among such characters are Alicent Hightower and her son Aegon Targaryen — and this is where it gets weird.
In fact, if you look into the actors who portrays these characters — Olivia Cooke and Tom Glynn-Carney, they don't really have a big age gap. Cooke was born on December 27, 1993, while her on-screen son, Glynn-Carney, was born less than 14 months later — on February 7, 1995.
The fact that "mother and son" are just a year apart when it comes to age gap makes the entire time jump thing and actor replacement quite nonsensical, given that the characters' age still remains a conditionality. In this sense, all the characters could have just been portrayed by the same actors that were introduced in their first appearance.
But even if the decision to recast some of the characters was inevitable, then the make-up team should have put effort into making the actors look older, fans believe.
"One of the only flaws so far is they probably should've made Alicent, Rhaenyra, and Cole look a bit older. Put some grey and fake crow's feet on them coz Cole especially doesn't look like he's aged at all," Twitter user Dishonestney argued.
However, many people argue that in this particular case, the recast works perfectly fine — not least due to Olivia Cooke looking convincing enough in her role of an adult mother of several kids.
Other people think that the reason is different.
"We know that Team Green are hot and never age. It's canon," Twitter user greenqueenali joked.
For Olivia Cooke, episode 9 was a swan song for season 1, as Alicent is not expected to appear in the tenth and final episode of House of the Dragon. Titled The Black Queen, the episode will premiere on HBO Max this Sunday, October 23.