What’s the opposite of stunnin’? That’s how House of the Dragon stars Olivia Cooke and Emma D’Arcy felt about the meme that emerged from their shared excitement over a crisp Negroni sbagliato. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the pair expressed dismay about how their banter took the internet by storm in 2022.
Cooke and D’Arcy star as friends turned fierce rivals on the Game of Thrones prequel series. Their brush with internet fame came while they were shooting a promo for the show’s first season. “We were put into this room, and we were just so jet-lagged,” recalled Cooke about the conditions that led to their viral moment. After picking a question prompt from a bowl shaped like a cracked-open dragon egg, Cooke asked D’Arcy what their drink of choice was. Without skipping a beat, D’Arcy gave a slightly sultry answer: “Negroni sbagliato with prosecco in it.” Cooke, in turn, responded simply: “Stunnin’!” The innocuous moment quickly went viral on the internet, prompting thousands to recreate the moment on TikTok.
“I did hate it for a very long time,” said Cooke in the new interview. “I was in the pub. A woman opened the door for me and she said with a thick Spanish accent, ‘Stunnin’!’ I was just like, Oh my God. Over a decade’s worth of work reduced to a single word in my lexicon.” D’Arcy also has mixed feelings about the ordeal. “I don’t have anything illuminating to say on it because it’s very hard to know how to react when you become a meme,” they said.
Now that the buzz has died down, though, the two actors can appreciate the virality of that moment, which helped boost House of the Dragon. The series returns to HBO on June 16 for season two. That being said, both are wiser now about the power of the internet—and were hesitant to participate in an EW photo shoot that put them on a giant chessboard, for fear that it would become another meme.
“Honest to God, when we walked on and I saw the chessboard, I was like, Well, this is over. It’s in my head the whole time,” said Cooke. “I was like, This is torture. We physically cannot do this.” For those who think Cooke needs to log off, don’t worry: She’s not logged on in the first place. “I refuse to do it,” she said of TikTok. “It’s just sad how you work for eight months and it fucking gets reduced to a fucking TikTok, and that makes me sad.”
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