House Of The Dragon’s Milly Alcock and Emily Carey have no idea what happens after they leave

At the risk of spoiling a secret that was already spoiled by every trailer for House Of The Dragon: The series is about to go through a big time-jump in its next episode, leaping ahead a number of years to continue telling the stories of Westeros’ most miserable families, and while it will be fun to see the horrific old-age makeup on Paddy Considine (the promo for next week’s episode made him look like if Mr. Burns melted), the jump does mean we’ll be losing two actors who are essentially the stars of the show: Milly Alcock and Emily Carey.

Alcock plays Rhaenyra Targaryen and Carey plays Queen Alicent Hightower, with Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke replacing them from here on out. But before that, the two of them spoke with The New York Times and explained that they have no idea what’s going to happen to their character’s next. In fact, they weren’t allowed to read the scripts past this week’s episode and they never got a chance to meet their time-jump counterparts, meaning everything that happens next is as much of a surprise to them as it is to us (assuming they also watched the promo for next week).

Alcock in particular says she asked for scripts and was told no, but they both seem excited about seeing what D’Arcy and Cooke do with their characters. Carey says she doesn’t think she would’ve been able to play Alicent at an older age, but she does think it’s “strange” to hand off the character and that it will be “really cool—and weird” to suddenly experience the story as a viewer. Also, Carey—who identifies in the interview as “a queer person”—notes that she picked up on an “undertone” in the script that there was something else going on in the friendship between these two characters, saying that these women may not know whether it’s romantic at all, but that “there’s just a closeness between two young women that cannot be verbalized, especially in the world they live in.”

Carey also says that both of them felt like they were “about to kiss” during a big conversation they had in the show’s fourth episode, noting that they didn’t “do anything to make them gay” or to “force” the issue onto anyone, but it “felt so natural” and that—if “you want to make the story more heartbreaking”—you can “choose to see it.” It will be interesting to see if D’Arcy and Cooke carry that thread at all.

Elsewhere in the chat, and only tangentially related to anything, Carey has this to say about how they’re passing the time now that they’re not the stars of a Game Of Thrones show: “Milly paces, and I sit and do Lego, and that’s the vibe.” In the show, her and Considine’s King Viserys bonded over his big model of King’s Landing, which is basically Westeros Legos! And she likes Legos in real life! Life is just like House Of The Dragon! (And good for her for the correct use of “Lego,” as in “Lego sets” or “Lego bricks,” rather than stupidly saying “Legos” like we did.)