We all remember where we were when the fine folks of House of the Dragon introduced the world to the enticing appeal of a Negroni Sbagliato (with prosecco!). Emma D’Arcy mentioned the cocktail in an interview, to which Olivia Cooke replied, ‘Stunnin!” and the world was never the same. Suddenly everyone and their mother was a cocktail connoisseur and bartenders across the world were slammed by hip millennials wanting to try the fancy drink.
Even though the bit offered a rare moment of internet solidarity, the two don’t really know why it went so viral. “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,” D’Arcy told Entertainment Weekly in a new interview.
Cooke contended that it was an organic moment which went viral for basically no reason. “We were just trying to make each other laugh. There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” she said, adding, “I did hate it for a very long time. 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.”
All of this just proves that anything can sound cool if it is said in an accent. It’s actually physically impossible to not say “Negroni” in an English accent. Try it! See?
House of the Dragon returns to HBO and Max on June 16.