features

House Of The Dragon’s Milly Alcock on why Rhaenyra is a more rewarding heroine than Daenerys | sTYLIST

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The breakout star of House Of The Dragon sits down with Stylist’s Christobel Hastings to chat female friendship, playing women who know what they want, and why Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen can claim to be a more rewarding heroine than the Mother of Dragons. Please note this article contains spoilers for the first episode of House Of The Dragon.

It’s not every day an up-and-coming actor lands a role in the biggest TV show of the year. A show whose epic predecessor dominated the Emmy races for the best part of a decade and produced a platinum-haired protagonist that became one of the most beloved in television history. On top of that, you then find out that you’re going to be playing the most important character in the whole saga. 

Such is the reality for Milly Alcock, the new star of House Of The Dragon, HBO’s hotly anticipated Game Of Thrones prequel. Set some 200 years before Daenerys Targaryen took to the skies to incinerate the capital city of King’s Landing, the new series finds the Targaryen dynasty on the brink of a bloody civil war known as The Dance of the Dragons. As the young Rhaenyra Targaryen, the princess whose succession kicks off the battle for the Iron Throne (and the only character whose face is plastered on the House Of The Dragon posters), the 22-year-old Australian actor is quite literally the face of the new fantasy series. So when I meet Alcock in central London before the London premiere of House Of The Dragon, there’s an unmistakable sense that she’s about to become a household name.

Read the full feature here.

‘Police were raiding gay bars wearing gloves and masks’: What it was like to live through the Aids crisis in London | The Independent

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Four decades after the Aids epidemic, Russell T Davies’ Channel 4 drama It’s a Sin has moved viewers and received critical acclaim. Christobel Hastings meets those who lived through the crisis in London and asks how realistic the portrayal is.

Forty years ago, reports of a mysterious new illness swept through the gay community. What started as a handful of cases in the US soon spiralled into a worldwide epidemic and, by the end of the 1980s, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Aids) had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. But decades later, stories exploring the impact on the British gay community have largely gone untold.

It was inevitable, then, that Russell T Davies would spark conversations with his powerful new drama, It’s a Sin. The show follows the lives of three young gay men, Ritchie Tozer (Olly Alexander), Roscoe Babatunde (Omari Douglas) and Colin Morris-Jones (Callum Scott Howells) who move to London in 1981. Along with Ritchie’s university best friend Jill (Lydia West), the group converges in a dilapidated flatshare and set out to explore everything the city has to offer: friendships, house parties, and plenty of wild sex. But as the chosen family embrace their newfound freedom, tragedy looms on the horizon.

Read the full feature here.