Olivia Cooke Has Not Started House of the Dragon’s Last Season

Olivia Cooke has not started work on House of the Dragon’s last season, with cameras due next spring. The English actor, who plays Queen Alicent Hightower, said the grief of leaving the part will likely hit her a year late.

That delay fits the queen she has to walk back into. Alicent was sent out of King’s Landing before the season 3 finale’s worst hour, and she still does not know what she lost. The book ending waiting behind that gap is not a battle death. It is a year of weeping in a locked room after the war is already over.

When House of the Dragon Season 4 Starts Filming

Cooke was asked whether she had begun getting ready to say goodbye. She said she had not, twice, then put a date on the shoot. “I haven’t. I haven’t. We start filming next spring, but I don’t really know. I’m sure it’ll take me ages.” She added that she is English, that her feelings sit far down, and that “a year later” she will finally feel the grief of the show ending.

Showrunner Ryan Condal had already named the same window. In June he said filming is tied to British weather and light, so the company starts in spring and wraps before the days get short. In August he said the work was on schedule: prep in the fall, then cameras in early 2027, the spring start Cooke just confirmed. The crew’s name for the run is the Last Dance.

COOKE’S NEXT DATES

Condal has been writing the last season while season 3 was still being cut, a loop he compared to a snake eating its tail. He said the team was as far ahead as it has ever been, turning drafts over to HBO, and that he does not put a script down until production takes it from him. Cooke not starting yet is not a stall. The machine is in the fall prep phase, and her call time is the spring light.

The Mission That Took Her Off the Map

Cooke has been a lead since mid-season 1, when she took over Alicent from Emily Carey, who played the queen as a teenager. The job in season 4 is narrower and colder than the court scenes that made her and Emma D’Arcy, who plays Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, the pair at the center of House of the Dragon on HBO.

Rhaenyra sent Alicent to Harrenhal to kill Prince Aemond, the son whose mother would be the last person he expected, after keeping Helaena Targaryen and her unborn child as leverage. Condal called it a moral bind with no clean choice. The finale confirms Alicent failed. Aemond lives. Aegon finds him. The Greens still have a war to fight.

While she is on that road, Helaena, played by Phia Saban, jumps from a Red Keep window onto the spikes below, taking the unborn son with her. Saban called it a tragedy and the shape of Helaena’s whole arc. D’Arcy, speaking after the finale, said Helaena was “maybe the only character who has a proximity to power, but remains kind of uncontaminated,” and that her death “condemns Rhaenyra to the path she’s chosen.” D’Arcy also said the road back to Alicent is likely impassable, and that the loss leaves Rhaenyra alone in the hunt for power.

WHAT ALICENT HAS NOT LEARNED YET

• Helaena: Her daughter is dead, having jumped rather than stay a hostage for Aegon.
• The child: The unborn son dies with her, a change from the book, where Maelor is born first.
• Aemond: The killing mission failed, and her remaining bond with that son is gone with it.
• Rhaenyra: The queen closes the window on the body and the tapestry, then walks on as a warrior in armor.

Alicent’s only turn in the finale is the approach back toward the Keep, cut against that death. She is not in the room. The version of the queen Cooke has to pick up in spring is a mother who has not been told, and a prisoner whose bargain for Helaena’s freedom already failed.

Fire and Blood Still Ends Her in a Locked Room

George R. R. Martin’s the Fire and Blood source history does not kill Alicent in the Dance. She outlives the children the war takes, then spends her last year shut in her rooms with a septa, serving girls, and guards at the door. The guards say she weeps more than she reads or sews. She tears her clothes to pieces, talks to herself, and turns against the color green that once marked her court.

She had outlived all of her children and spent the last year of her life confined to her apartments, with no company but her septa, the serving girls who brought her food, and the guards outside her door.

George R. R. Martin, Fire and Blood

Winter fever takes her in 133 AC, at 45, on a rainy night at the hour of the wolf. In her last hours she wants her sons, “Helaena, my sweet girl,” and old King Jaehaerys, the man she once read to as a girl. She does not ask for Viserys. The show has already moved Helaena’s death forward, so Cooke’s last season is not a straight copy of that epilogue, but the shape is the same: the feeling arrives after the event, in a room, with no one left to hear it.

That is the part of Alicent that matches Cooke’s own account of leaving. The actor is not doing the work yet because the shoot is still a season away. The character she returns to is built to feel a loss late.

Condal Has Eight Hours Left and Calls It Payoff

Season 1 ran 10 episodes. Seasons 2 and 3 ran eight each. Condal has now said the last season is eight hours as well, eight chapters, not the extra run some viewers wanted after Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max Content, had left room for a longer close. The count matches what he told Deadline in June, when he said season 4 would keep a similar cadence and that “the ambition” would be huge. “It will be the biggest season we have made, for sure,” he said.

The whole season is payoff. We’re all on schedule, prep starts in the fall. So we’ll go back and start revising the scripts, planning sets, location scouts are already happening over the course of the summer to figure out new places we’re going. And then before you know it, hammers will be swinging and 3.4 million screws will be being put together at Leavesden.

Ryan Condal, showrunner, on the Pilot TV podcast

He has described the remaining work as how to use those eight hours to close as many threads as the show can, while leaving a wistful open end that makes people want more. Cooke’s Alicent is one of those threads. She does not need a battle speech in episode 1. She needs the hours after she learns what the butterflies on the road were already telling her.

Sid Baker Returns on September 16

The reason Cooke can say she has not started is sitting on a different service. Slow Horses season 6 premieres on Apple TV on September 16, with weekly episodes through October 21, and the trailer restored her as Sidonie “Sid” Baker, the MI5 officer season 1 had seemed to kill. Cooke said she had been taking availability checks for years and “was biding my time because I was desperate to work.”

That job is the live one. House of the Dragon’s fall prep is sets, locations, and script passes at Leavesden. Her Alicent work waits on the spring light Condal has to straddle. The talk around Cooke in August was the spy-show return and season 3 hair stills, not a farewell tour for the queen, which is the calendar talking: she is in the gap, not in the last dance yet.

D’Arcy is already a two-time Golden Globe nominee for the first two seasons, and the finished third run is in play for the coming awards cycle. Cooke’s next public run as Alicent is still the 2028 air date. Until then the English delay she described is also a shooting schedule.

Leavesden Gets the Screws Before the Cast Returns

The last three seasons were built on the Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden stages in Hertfordshire, including the virtual-production volume the first season used. Condal’s 3.4 million screws line is the fall work: revising pages, planning sets, and locking new locations the scouts already walked in summer. Season 3 cameras ran from late March to early October 2025, six months, then the show needed the long dragon pipeline before it reached air.

THE ROAD TO THE LAST DANCE

1. June 21, 2026: Season 3 premieres, eight episodes, after that March-to-October 2025 shoot.
2. August 9, 2026: The finale sends Alicent out of the Keep and kills Helaena offscreen from her mother.
3. August 11, 2026: Condal says the last season is on schedule, prep in the fall, filming in early 2027.
4. September 16, 2026: Cooke returns as Sid Baker, the job that sits in front of Alicent.
5. Fall 2026: Leavesden prep, script passes, hammers, the 3.4 million screws.
6. Spring 2027: Cooke’s cameras, timed to British summer light.
7. 2028: The last season on HBO, after a year of shoot and the seven to eight months Condal says dragons take.

He has been blunt about why the wait does not shrink. Prep and shooting, after the pages are written, take a year. Dragons take seven to eight months. “Do the math. It’s not possible to come out every year.” HBO has the close on a 2028 path, the same two-year gap as the last two cycles. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the Dunk and Egg series that landed as a larger hit in the first half of 2026, is aimed at a season 2 in early 2027, which fills the year House of the Dragon is still in the shed.

HBO Has the Final Season on a 2028 Path

Condal renewed with HBO through 2029 and said the new deal was “the beginning of the next chapter, whatever that happens to be.” On Westeros itself he was dryer: anything is possible, but he thinks he has said what he has to say. Season 4 is the end of this story, mapped from Fire and Blood and already in draft while season 3 was still being finished.

All of the finished show, including season 3 on HBO Max, is up to stream. Cooke’s next pass at Alicent starts when the light in England does. By the time those eight hours air in 2028, the year of delayed feeling she described will already have begun, which is the same clock the queen is on, walking back toward a Keep that has not yet told her the truth.