'House of the Dragon's' Emily Carey Defends Show Structure: 'Ambitious'

House of the Dragon has so far charted several years in the lives of Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Milly Alcock) and Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey), as it follows their early friendship and its demise.

With that focus, the HBO hit has made several time jumps already. In Episode 3, Alicent is heavily pregnant and in Episode 4 her child is well past the newborn stage, for example.

But for Carey, who uses she/they pronouns, the "genius" creative team made it easy to approach as an actor, they explained to Newsweek.

'House of the Dragon's' Emily Carey Defends Show Structure: 'It's Ambitious'

House of the Dragon is set 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, when the Targaryen dynasty was at its peak and King Viserys I (Paddy Considine) was on the Iron Throne.

King Viserys chooses his daughter, Rhaenyra, as his heir, but what he couldn't know was the way in which this decision would lead to the Dance of the Dragons. A civil war amongst the Targaryen family that almost wiped them out, and begins when Alicent challenges Rhaenyra's right to the throne.

Carey plays Alicent in her teenage years before Olivia Cooke will take over the role when she is an adult. They shared how "ambitious" they found the show's approach to its intricate storyline, which is based on the book Fire and Blood by George R. R. Martin.

"It moves fast, it definitely moves fast and I think reading the scripts I was certainly like, 'how is this going to work?'" Carey said. "How are they going to make me look 14 at 9 a.m. and then we go through a scene after lunch, and suddenly I'm 18 and I'm pregnant?

"And then as soon as we started doing the costume fittings and that kind of thing, [working with our] genius team behind the show, everything started to fall into place.

"As an actor, I was kind of scared coming onto it, [I was] not sure how I was going to approach it and having to jump between [time periods], and the shoot was so long as well, it was like 9-10 months and so that's a long time to have to jump back and forth between scenes, and try and remember what you're doing and where you're going.

"But, I think it reads really well on screen and I think it was all needed. I think every time skip needed to be there and the show would be completely different if they weren't there.

"I think showing such a broad span of someone's life in such a short period of time is an amazing thing to do on screen. It's ambitious, and it doesn't always pay off [on TV] but I think as a viewer it's so cool to watch when it's done well, and I hope everyone agrees with me when I say that in the show it was done well.

"From my perspective it felt like it was being done well, like we felt reassured when we were on set and we were actually doing it, which is a nice, a comfortable feeling, I guess."

House of the Dragon airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.