Source: Entertainment Weekly
The Force was not with Olivia Cooke during her Star Wars audition.
During a recent visit to the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the 32-year-old House of the Dragon star shot down speculation that she was in the running to play Kelly Marie Tran’s character Rose Tico in The Last Jedi, but revealed that she did try out for Rey in The Force Awakens.
“I did audition a few times for the other one, where Daisy Ridley got [the role of Rey]… The first one,” Cooke said, referring to 2015 sequel. “But, like, everyone and their dog auditioned for that.”
The experience went, well… not well. “I think I auditioned once in L.A. and then once with J.J. [Abrams],” she recalled, who directed both The Force Awakens and its 2019 sequel The Rise of Skywalker. “And I was s—. I was really bad.”
When host Josh Horowitz began to ask what happened, Cooke continued, “I was just bad. You know when you go into an audition, and you’re just not bringing it, and you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let everyone down in the room?”
Ewan Mitchell explains ‘House of the Dragon’ season 3’s shocking Aemond-Alicent moment
The Bates Motel star noted that Star Wars found the Jedi that they were looking for in the end. “Daisy did such an amazing job,” she added. “I just wasn’t that kind of actor at that time. It wasn’t a fit.”
While Cooke was aware that she wasn’t going to be traveling to a galaxy far, far away after her ill-fated Star Wars audition, she explained that there have been moments within her career where she felt confident that she’d booked a role only to have it slip through her fingers in the end.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
“I’ve not had a really devastating one for a few years but, Endless Love with Alex Pettyfer,” she recalled. “It was a remake. I screen tested for that, and I wanted it so badly, and I was 19, and it was my first ever screen test and I was just like, ‘I’ve gotta get this.’”
The role ultimately went to actress Gabriella Wilde, which broke Cooke’s heart at the time.
“My agent rung me up like in the middle of the night in the U.K. ‘cause they were in America and I wept into my childhood pillow in my childhood home,” Cooke said. “I was like my career is not gonna amount to anything because I didn’t get Endless Love.”
Thankfully, that wasn’t the end of Cooke’s acting career. She has since gone on to star in films such as Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Ready Player One, and Sound of Metal. She is perhaps best known, however, for playing Queen Alicent Hightower on the Game of Thrones prequel, House of the Dragon.
