‘Just F—ing Go for It’: How ‘Supergirl’ Star Milly Alcock Learned to Ignore the Trolls and Became a Punk Rock Superhero

Alcock appears to be similarly grounded. Before “House of the Dragon,” but after she had a starring role in “Upright,” a hit Australian TV show at age 18, in need of extra cash, she continued washing dishes at a popular Sydney restaurant. “I sound like a Roald Dahl character. I was living in the attic in my family home because we didn’t have enough rooms — it was so hot in there,” she says. “I was a stick of a thing. I was washing these dishes so proudly and so terribly, and it was an open kitchen so everyone could see me.”

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She says that our conversation — over breakfast at The London West Hollywood — is her first long in-person interview, but she doesn’t appear to be anything other than comfortable, self-assured and quick to laugh. Nor is her exhaustion evident. She’s bright-eyed, having woken up early to work out, then gotten a black iced coffee before doing an interview over Zoom. It’s on our table now, ice melting. Always black? I ask. “No, I like to change it up,” she says. And what was the other interview? “She only got 20 minutes,” Alcock says with a smile. “Don’t worry!”

It’s quite difficult, actually, to picture this confident 26-year-old being nervous. But she describes herself as “so scared” for her “Supergirl” audition in January 2024 at Georgia’s Trilith Studios, where writer-director James Gunn’s “Superman” was filming. She’d travelled on the 24-hour flight to Atlanta from her family home in Sydney. “Supergirl” wasn’t scheduled to begin filming for another year; it didn’t even have a director yet. But the Kara character would appear at the end of “Superman,” along with its star, David Corenswet. After the main story of “Superman” wrapped up, a drunken Kara would make a surprise appearance before the credits, a cameo that would introduce this new messy version of Supergirl and get fans hyped for her stand-alone movie. Since “Superman” had a release date of July 11, 2025, Gunn and Peter Safran, DC Studios’ co-chairmen and co-CEOs, needed to cast Kara right away.

Alcock had never tested for a role in person, having been cast as young Rhaenyra, her first major job outside Australia, in the fall of 2020, when everything was over Zoom. But she wasn’t scared of the audition itself. “It’s the stakes, you know?” Alcock says. Other young actors were in contention for the highly coveted role. Meg Donnelly, who’d voiced Kara in two animated movies, also tested. But having seen Alcock in “House of the Dragon,” Gunn had a sense that she would be the one, emailing recently from the set of the “Superman” sequel that he’d thought she was bring “an innate edge I thought Supergirl needed.”

This Supergirl — from Tom King’s 2021-22 “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow” comics — would be punk rock. She wouldn’t be squeaky-clean like other Supergirls we’ve seen, whether in the 1984 self-titled movie with Helen Slater that bombed or in the more recent television adaptation starring Melissa Benoist that ran for six seasons on The CW Network. No, in this version, Kara, as Safran puts it in an interview, is “super tough” and has “been through some shit,” having witnessed the slow demise of her home planet of Krypton, and watched everyone she loves — her parents especially — die.

At the audition that day, there wasn’t a Supergirl costume for her to wear — that would come later (they scanned her head to toe to create one) — so they dressed Alcock in a blue long-sleeved shirt and a red skirt, a shortcut that only increased her feeling of, she says, “What am I doing?” She stood before a group that included Gunn, Safran, “Supergirl” screenwriter Ana Nogueira and DC executive Chantal Nong, who had long championed the project — and Safran remembers it well.

“Everybody had tears in their eyes,” he says. “She wears her heart on her sleeve; she brings so much emotion to the role. We all looked at each other and said, “This is absolutely perfect. She’s exactly what we want.”

Nogueira agrees: Alcock nailed it. “We had really good actresses come in — like, people that gave great auditions,” she says. “It’s not even really about that? It’s just like, Milly’s the girl.”

Alcock, who has an affinity for cats, shares something with those charming but unknowable animals, Nogueira says. “You’re just like a cat,” she remembers thinking of Alcock. “I just want to put a camera on you and watch you go about the day. Because you’re not pretending to be anything.”

Around 10 days after her audition, Alcock estimates, Gunn made it official. She was back in Sydney, and he sent her a link to a news story announcing she’d been cast.

She’d never been No. 1 on a call sheet, and when she read Nogueira’s script, she felt the weight of that: “I was like, ‘I have to do all that?! No!‘ Because she’s in, like, every scene.” But she also got excited. Alcock was drawn to Kara’s trauma, to her pain. “My personal experience of being Milly mirrored Kara’s experience, which was ‘Hide. Run away. Pretend it’s not happening,’” she says. “And then you have to face it to heal a part of yourself that you’ve been neglecting.”

She knew relating to this character, this alien superhero, was an unlikely gift. So she decided to take the leap and do the brave thing. “I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was like, ‘Who am I to turn down this opportunity?” she says. “I knew that it was what I needed to do, because it scared me. And I thought, ‘Well, I get one big, bad, beautiful life. Why not fucking go for it?’

“Just fucking go for it!” Alcock says forcefully. “What are you, scared? Get over yourself.”

This summer will be a movie season in which films based on tried-and-true IP (“Toy Story 5,” “Minions & Monsters,” the live-action “Moana”) will be punctuated by potential blockbusters by two auteurs, Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” and Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s “The Odyssey.” Amid these offerings and more, on June 26, DC will release Supergirl,” directed by Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya”), who was hired a few months after Alcock.

Superhero movies, once the industry’s slam dunks, are no longer sure bets. Marvel’s remarkable winning streak with its “Avengers” movies in the 2010s fizzled after “Avengers: Endgame” in 2019, and it’s been hit or miss for both Marvel and DC in recent years. In 2022, Warner Bros. hired Gunn (the director of Marvel’s massively popular “Guardians of the Galaxy” trilogy) and Safran (the producer of 2018’s “Aquaman,” DC’s highest-grossing movie) to, as DC Studios’ chairmen, establish a sprawling universe inspired by Marvel. Last summer’s “Superman” — Gunn and Safran’s first official movie in the DCU — made more than $600 million at the box office, which was considered a promising beginning, but not a home run. So there’s a lot riding on “Supergirl.”

For Alcock, those stakes she’d worried about before her audition are both professional and personal. After playing Rhaenyra for the first half of Season 1 of “House of the Dragon,” she had little appetite to work in another massive franchise. But in Kara, Superman’s first cousin — she’s a fellow alien from Krypton who’s also sent to Earth after the destruction of their planet — she found a character whose dilemmas and fears, perhaps oddly, mirrored her own.

The 2025 “Superman” is largely earthbound, with Clark Kent (Corenswet) fighting his nemesis Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) mostly in and around Metropolis. At the end of the movie, needing to heal, Superman heads up to his home base in the Arctic, the Fortress of Solitude. Kara crashes in, all boozed up, having returned to a planet where their super-metabolism doesn’t work. “Where is my dog?” she asks, slurring and stumbling. Krypto — the incorrigible canine with white fur and floppy ears, and wearing a red cape, who, along with Kara and Superman, is the third living survivor of Krypton — flies across the room, jumping on her and slamming her to the floor as she giggles. “Come on,” she calls to Krypto, leading him away as she says to Superman, “Thanks for watching him, bitch!”

When Alcock put on the Supergirl costume to shoot that scene, which adds up to one minute of screen time, Nong, DC’s executive vice president of production, had an emotional reaction. “Chantal full-on ugly cried,” Safran says with a laugh. “It was a culmination of so much hard work. And then to see somebody who so perfectly embodied the character — when Milly walked out, we all felt it.”

Alcock was alarmed at first, not understanding what was happening: “Chantal just cried, and I hugged her, and I was like, ‘Are you OK?’” Nong told Alcock she’d been trying to make “Supergirl” for years. “That’s when I understood,” she says. “I’ve got a responsibility.”

“Supergirl,” at its start, will find Kara on one of her benders. “Yeah, she’s a mess! And it’s almost in a fun way, right?” says screenwriter Nogueira.

But Kara isn’t actually having fun; she’s trying to disappear. Other than Krypto, she doesn’t have love in her life: She doesn’t have friends or a romantic partner. Nor does she feel the duty to help people that Superman — who was sent away from Krypton as an infant and raised by a loving family in Kansas — has embraced. “Pain is a universal feeling,” Alcock says. “I was able to connect with that pretty instantly. And that was the thing that would ground me in her.”

Though Alcock had worn the Supergirl costume in “Superman,” that wouldn’t be the dress code while she’s getting sloppy in another galaxy — thus the Blondie T-shirt. “Which is what she wears all the time in the film,” Gillespie says. “There’s absolutely no makeup. And she’s making absolutely no effort with her appearance — that’s not her priority. And she’s not in a good mood!”

When I ask Alcock at what point in the movie Kara puts on the Supergirl suit, she says, “I don’t know if I can tell you!” But I press. “It’s DC — I’m scared,” she says, not wanting to spoil. “But I don’t wear it as much as people will think. It’s a journey.”

It’s that journey — comics writer King has said he was inspired by the Western “True Grit” — that snaps Kara out of her destructive cycle. And what gives her purpose is meeting Ruthye, who’s also endured tragedy, and wants to avenge her family’s death at the hands of the bandit Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts). At first, Kara is reluctant to take on Ruthye’s revenge quest, but when Krem shoots Krypto with a poisonous dart and steals her ship, she pretty much has no choice: She needs the antidote to save Krypto.

“Through helping save this young girl and deal with her trauma from losing her entire family, there’s a kinship there,” Alcock says. “She realizes that being Supergirl has nothing to do with her and has to do with everybody else around her. She needs to put her own feelings aside to help others, and through that she can save herself. So that’s what the suit is for her.”

During preproduction, Alcock did two months of stunt training at Leavesden, the Warner Bros. studio outside London where the “Harry Potter” movies were shot, and where “Supergirl” would also film. Always an athletic kid, she learned to throw punches, how to take a punch, how to fall and so on. Alcock’s work ethic impressed Gillespie.

“She blew me away. This is such a huge project for any actor, but somebody at her age, to have to step in — it’s a four-and-a-half-month shoot.”

One thing Alcock wasn’t doing was watching superhero movies to familiarize herself with the genre. She hasn’t seen “Black Widow” or “Captain Marvel” — she’s never even seen the Gal Gadot-led “Wonder Woman,” DC’s 2017 smash. “Which is probably not great,” Alcock says. “I should just lie!”

“House of the Dragon,” a prequel to “Game of Thrones,” HBO’s most popular series of all time, was an instant hit when it premiered in August 2022 — defying the nearly impossible odds of successfully following up “Thrones,” a culture-defining monster. “House of the Dragon” co-creators Ryan Condal and George R.R. Martin had cast younger actors to play teenage versions of Rhaenyra (Alcock) and her childhood best friend and soon-to-be-enemy Alicent Hightower (Emily Carey) for the show’s first five episodes. The two women’s bloody fight to rule Westeros after Episode 5 forms the series’ overarching plot, and Alcock and Carey would tag out, with Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke tagging in, when the story jumped forward 10 years in its sixth episode.

Alcock was only 20 when she was cast in “House of the Dragon,” and Condal remembers how she won the role. “People talk about the ‘it’ factor and things like that — but she just has this dimensional quality that is not something that you can learn as an actor. There’s just a natural grace and charisma,” he says. “We just knew in the first meeting with her that this is our Rhaenyra.”

Despite the show’s success, as the first season rolled out, something shitty happened on the internet. A toxic subset of the “House of the Dragon” fandom pitted the younger actors — who became immediate fan favourites — against their adult counterparts. These viral, ugly sentiments, expressed on Reddit, YouTube and social media, “broke my heart,” Alcock says. The entire point of “House of the Dragon” is the tragedy that these two young women who love one another fall out because the men around them want them to be divided — to serve their own patriarchal, Game of Thrones-y agendas. Alcock watched as fans online came after D’Arcy. “I just felt for Emma,” she says.

Condal also saw what was happening and felt despair. “It’s an unfortunate by-product of the internet rage machine — we have so turned against ourselves in fandom,” he says. “This kind of fandom used to be the happy place to go, where people who liked different things within the same world could just find common ground.

“And I thought it was horrible! And it’s horrible for all these young performers that did a great thing, and kind of did an impossible thing,” he continues, raising his voice for emphasis. “Everybody should have just been celebrating the success and reception of that show. And people should find something else to do with their time, frankly.”

More than three and a half years later, online discourse has only gotten more pernicious and harmful. Reality contestants on Love Island” and “The Traitors” are doxxed and get death threats, and even the fandoms for “The Pitt” and “Heated Rivalry” have become nightmarish cesspools. Superhero movies are the original battleground for backlash and organized attacks on review sites, so you’d better put on your flak jacket before heading into the fray.

In March, while promoting “Supergirl,” Alcock experienced this unpleasant phenomenon from once again, after pointing out to Vanity Fair that she’d learned from her experience on “House of the Dragon” that “simply existing as a woman in that space is something that people comment on. We have become very comfortable having this weird ownership of women’s bodies.” You would have thought a bomb had gone off, so quickly did the rage machine set its sights on Alcock.

“I didn’t even say ‘men’ — I said ‘people!’” Alcock says. “And they got so angry. I was like, ‘You’re proving my point. You’re proving my point!’”

Alcock even understands, sort of, where these base urges originate, with the world as unstable and terrifying as it is now: Governments don’t have anyone’s best interests at heart, and people turn “to online forums to find that guidance,” she says. “It just creates an unhealthy relationship with a person” who will eventually, and inevitably, disappoint their fans.

“I guess women know that this is just how it’s always been, unfortunately,” Alcock adds. “And it’s from a lot of people whose profiles have no photo, who are burner accounts. Or someone’s name and then ‘Dad of four, Christian,’ which is hilarious to me. But I mean, whose opinion do you really care about? If you’re pissing the right kind of people off, you’re doing OK.”

When Safran noticed the outsize flare-up over Alcock’s remarks, he reached out. “I called her and just said, ‘You’re doing great! You’re handling it beautifully. You’re never going to make everybody happy. Just be true to yourself,’” he says. “And I really do think she’s handling it well. I would also recommend, don’t wallow in it. It never makes you feel good.”

But Alcock is a child of the internet, and it’s just really hard to put down the phone. “Because sometimes people reinforce beliefs that you have about yourself, and you’re like, ‘Now someone’s said it! It’s true!’ And you’ve got to remind yourself that it’s not,” she says. When she does get sucked in, she has a remedy. “Sitting at a café and watching people and reading alone — just being a participant in real life — has been helpful.”

She sighs. “It’s something I’m trying to get better at,” she says. “I’m Gen Z! Yeah, I grew up online, so I’m actively trying not to engage — although how could you not?”

Alcock knew she wanted to act when she was in second grade, at around 7 years old. It was a grade she’d end up repeating (“I wasn’t particularly academically clever,” she says) — but it was also when she fell in love with performing while playing the title character in “Little Red Rocking Hood,” a musical adaptation of the fairy tale. Singing a few bars, she lights up at the memory of skipping and dancing around onstage. “‘This feeling,’” she remembers thinking, “‘whatever this feeling is, I want it for the rest of my life.’ And that was the thing that hooked me — the adrenaline.”

Performing changed her. “I had an inability to express myself fully within my life. Within my relationships, I would hold things back,” Alcock says. “And acting gave me this outlet that was really safe where I could feel everything. My emotional dysregulation was applauded, and was the best thing about me.”

She’d go on to Sydney’s Newtown High School of the Performing Arts, which counts actors such as Sophie Wilde and Odessa Young among its alumni. But after getting small parts throughout high school, she dropped out in her senior year after scoring that leading role in “Upright,” a TV series about a musician (Tim Minchin) and a runaway teen played by Alcock. It was her mother who urged her to leave school for it, she says. “She’s like, ‘Who cares? It doesn’t matter!’” Alcock says. “She’s fabulous.” (“Upright” was the project that got her noticed by the “House of the Dragon” team, during her stint washing dishes.)

Alcock has a busy year before her. Late last year, she starred in an indie movie called “Thumb,” along with Sofía Vergara and Kate McKinnon, directed by “Tuesday” filmmaker Daina Oniunas-Pusić, in which she plays a “very lonely” woman who receives a severed thumb in the mail. The film will likely be festival bound. Going from “Supergirl” to an indie was perfectly fine, Alcock says. “I got to take my best friend along, Ari, to be my assistant. I’ve known him since I was 4, and it was so fun. I was like, ‘Oh, this is why I’m doing it!’ It was so fulfilling.” Then there’s the reason for her six-week stay in Japan, where she filmed auteur Takashi Miike’s latest untitled horror movie — also starring Charli xcx — the plot details of which are under wraps. Tomorrow, she’ll fly to London, where she’s made a life since filming “House of the Dragon,” and lives with her chef boyfriend, Jo Powell, and their Persian cat, Guinness. (Both are frequently featured on her Instagram.)

It won’t be a long stop home, though, because she’ll be on her way back to Atlanta to play Kara again, in Gunn’s “Superman: Man of Tomorrow,” as the DCU continues to build on itself. “She’s a major part of what we’re doing,’” Safran says.

She’ll also be embarking on the global promotional campaign for “Supergirl.” A few months ago, Alcock says, she was out for a run in a park in London when she saw a little girl in a Supergirl sweater. “I’m going to burst into tears,” she thought to herself. She realized then how much she’s looking forward to the film being released into the world. “I am so excited for all the young women who are going to see this — that’s really going to get me.”

It will be wonderful, of course, if “Supergirl” is a blockbuster, proving, as “Wonder Woman” and “Captain Marvel” did before it, that broad audiences will go see a woman superhero, and that the trolls and incels on the internet can just move along onto their next hateful campaign. But whatever happens, the “Supergirl” message of saving yourself so you can connect with other people has already imprinted onto Alcock.

“What Kara was going through that I was going through is she’s someone who has been at war with themselves. And I think that’s a very universal feeling — especially for women,” Alcock says. “So it’s been a really surprising journey. I never thought taking on a superhero film would do that. But it has! And what a beautiful thing.”

Styling: Oretta Corbelli/Honey Artists; Assistant stylist : Allegra Gargiulo; Hair: Jordan M for Bumble and Bumble /Susan Price NYC; Makeup: Misha/A-Frame Agency; Look 1 (cover): Full look; Thom Browne; Rings: Pomellato; Look 2 (denim): Full look: Miu Miu; Jewelry: Chopard; Look 3 (leather coat): Full look: Saint Laurent; Ring: Chopard; Look 4 (red dress): Full Look: Balenciaga; Earrings: Chopard; Look 5 (leather mini): Full look: Hermes; Look 6 (black sweater): Full look: Louis Vuitton; Jewelry: Bvlgari; Boots: Le Silla; Look 7 (hoodie): Full look: AREA; Shoes: Le Silla