Olivia Cooke "hated" becoming a meme after going viral while promoting 'House of the Dragon'.
The 30-year-old actress and her co-star Emma D'Arcy ended up all over TikTok thanks to the 'Negroni Sbagliato' meme back in 2022, and she struggled with the attention being on a joke rather than the show itself.
She told Entertainment Weekly: "We were just trying to make each other laug. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I did hate it for a very long time."
While shooting promos for the first season of HBO's 'Game of Thrones' spin off, the two castmates were filmed asking each other questions.
Olivia remembered being "so jet-lagged" when she asked Emma to name her "drink of choice".
Emma gave her answer ("Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it", and her co-star replied in her Manchester accent: "Stunnin'!"
Speaking two years on to promote the show's second season, Olivia recalled: "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.”
While she has started to come to terms with the social media frenzy now, she admitted it really did upset her.
She explained: "It’s just sad how you work for eight months and it f****** gets reduced to a f****** TikTok, and that makes me sad."
Emma added: "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 have learned to embrace the meme, and now accept that the widespread attention was down to their chemistry as much as anything else.
However, they have also become more wary and savvier about what things have the potential to go viral, and Olivia even had second thoughts when a life-sized chess board was created for their EW cover shoot, as it reiminded them of the 'Harry Potter' chess scene meme.
She said: "Honest to God, when we walked on and I saw the chess board, I was like, ‘Well, this is over.’ It’s in my head the whole time. I was like, ‘This is torture. We physically cannot do this.'”
