Actor Milly Alcock was born and raised in Sydney. She started acting on Australian TV aged 14, and four years later won a Casting Guild of Australia rising star award for her role in comedy-drama Upright, which was written by and co-starred Tim Minchin. In 2022’s Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon she played the young Rhaenyra Targaryen and was nominated for two Critics Choice awards for the role. Next, the 23-year-old stars as Abigail Williams in the National Theatre’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Gielgud theatre, London, from 7 June.
1. Play
Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Lyric Hammersmith, London
Tom Basden’s adaptation of Dario Fo’s classic satirical farce had me in hysterics. It was so comical and fast-paced, almost slapstick. Daniel Rigby, who played the lead, was just phenomenal. It’s an incredibly relevant work about police brutality and corruption. It’s about a man who’s arrested by the police and ends up tricking everyone and interrogating the police officers, and they don’t realise he’s pretending to be a judge the entire time. This was the first play my family and I have seen together – I took them out to see it while they were visiting.
2. Art
I saw this with a friend, and it truly takes you to another planet. It’s an immersive art exhibition that submerges you in a postapocalyptic landscape that feels like a fever dream. You walk into these big warehouses and you’re immersed in sound and light. The colours were really muted: mostly red and blue, and everything else was hues of white and cream. You could walk through one of the light projections: it felt really trippy because you didn’t really know where you were in relation to the room because of it.
3. Film
Sick of Myself (dir. Kristoffer Borgli, 2023)
This is by the people who did The Worst Person in the World, which I loved. It’s clever, smart and self-aware, and hands down the most surprising film I’ve seen in years. Kristine Kujath Thorp is absolutely incredible in it. She plays this woman who pretends to be sick to get attention, hyper-sensationalising her pain. In the opening scene she works at a cafe and this woman gets mauled by a dog, and she gets high off being the only person to attend to her. Then it completely snowballs from there. A must-watch.
4. Book
I bought this at the National Theatre bookshop before rehearsals. It’s sickly, seductive and scary – I couldn’t put it down. It follows a young woman trying to establish her career as a photographer. She takes fetish images of boys, and the book explores the power dynamic between artist and subject. It looks at the ugly emotions women have that aren’t usually written or talked about. The narrator is ultimately someone who doesn’t like herself very much, and uses all the people in her life to make her feel better. So she’s not a very good person.
5. Song
Vienna by Billy Joel
I listened to this song a lot when I moved back home to shoot Upright season two, because it really struck a chord with me. With my work, everything unravelled really, really quickly and it felt like I didn’t have time to catch up with it or with myself, or process it. So that song gave me a lot of reassurance: even though it feels like the wrong thing to do, and everyone’s telling you to speed up and run faster, you need to slow down because it will all still be there.
6. Podcast
This is very geeky of me but I’ve listened to every A24 podcast. A24 is an independent production company who have done films like The End of the Tour, Midsommar and Everything Everywhere All at Once – they have really good taste not only in written storytelling but in visual storytelling. The podcast features actors, writers, directors and producers who have either worked together on one particular project or aspire to work within the A24 universe. I loved the Brendan Fraser and Michelle Yeoh episode.
