Sometimes everything threatened to become too much. Alcock remembers one particular instance when she was in Paris for a Loewe show last year. Her car to get the Eurostar back home was stuck in traffic, so she got out to walk the short distance to the train station. She could feel the autograph chasers before she laid eyes on them: “Your skin gets red—you feel really unsafe,” Alcock says. “They were hounding me. There were, like, 10 of them, and I was just by myself. And they kept following me, and some of the public were like, ‘What are you doing? Leave this girl alone.’”
Alcock sprinted through Gare du Nord; they kept pace with her until the security checkpoint. “I couldn’t stop shaking. Compared to what other people get and how things are going to change, it’s nothing,” she reasons, even though it really sounds like something. “That’s the fear. I don’t want to live in a glass house, but that’s the cost of it.”
Up until now, Alcock’s life had never moved this fast. She lives in a quiet end of East London, where she moved in 2020 to play the younger version of Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon. After a childhood spent in a quiet suburb of Sydney, the Game of Thrones prequel was disorienting. When the shoot for the first season ended, she “kept getting these crazy visuals of me walking down the street, pole falling, I’m dead,” she says. “Horrific ways of me getting injured in the world. I think my brain was like, Because something good has happened, something bad has to happen to make that even.”
Alcock doesn’t keep up with the news out of Westeros anymore. “I’m not really a sci-fi girl, to be honest with you,” she confesses. “It’s not really my world as a consumer, but as a participant it was really fun.”
There have been hit-and-miss attempts at bringing the Girl of Steel to screens over the years, but Safran tells me that he and Gunn were looking for a “Supergirl for the next generation,” one who would play a significant role in the DCU. Gunn zeroed in on Alcock in House of the Dragon and floated the idea of casting her to Safran before they even knew her name. “She’s quite diminutive in size, but she has a charisma that really belies her physical presence,” Safran tells me. Alcock’s audition was one of the first they saw. When she came in later to screen-test in front of Safran and Gunn along with Nogueira and DC executive vice president Chantal Nong Vo, she more than won them over.
“Chantal was just bawling,” Safran remembers. “She was crying so hard at the screen test, because it was a very emotional scene, but she was also crying because of how great Milly was in the role.”
