Cast and crew talk us through House of the Dragon

Over three years after the end of Game of Thrones, HBO is here with a prequel series: House of the Dragon will tell the story of a brutal civil war that tore the Seven Kingdoms apart some 200 years before the story we know. The show is nearly here, and the cast and crew are ready to talk.

Specifically, they talked with Entertainment Weekly, at length, about what to expect when the new series premieres next month. Let’s hit some of the highlights.

Rhaenyra Targareyn is “the most important role in the show, in many ways”

House of the Dragon has a lot in common with Game of Thrones. There are a ton of characters, they have complicated relationships with each other, and they eventually get caught up in a bloody war. If you can believe it, this story — based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood — is even more brutal than the one told on Game of Thrones. If the series gets to tell the full tale, we’ll see the Targaryen dynasty go from the height of its power to one of its lowest points. “I wanted to tell a story about the height of Rome before the fall and see the Targaryen dynasty at its very apex so that we can understand the thing that was lost when it all fell apart,” said showrunner Ryan Condal.

"Nobody alive in this story has ever seen a war or a meaningful conflict. Yes, there have been skirmishes and tournaments, but we’re living in this society based on conflicts for power. We’re watching a period of time where every man has been trained for battle since birth, but battle doesn’t happen. That pent-up energy leaks out between the cracks and starts to wear on itself where you almost need the release of war in order to keep the whole thing from boiling over."

At the center of it all is Rhaenyra Targaryen, who’s played by Milly Alcock as a young woman and Emma D’Arcy as an adult; the show will cover a goodly stretch of years leading up to the breakout of the war, and it will do it chronologically, as EW confirms. So Alcock will play Rhaenyra for a certain number of episodes until time passes and D’Arcy takes over; don’t expect any Witcher-esque multiple timelines here.

Anyway, Rhaenrya is the daughter of King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine), who flouts tradition by making her his heir apparent despite history making it clear that only males can inherit. This causes problems later, after King Viserys dies and his son by his second wife, Aegon II Targaryen, contests Rhaenyra’s claim to the Iron Throne.

“She has an understanding of history and famous dragonriders, especially female dragonriders,” said Alcock, who sees a bit of Arya Stark in Rhaenyra (she auditioned for the part with dialogue from an Arya scene). “They’re both women who don’t behave the way that they’re expected to. There is that rebellious and cheeky spirit that they both possess, which I think is why people are going to adore her.”

As for D’Arcy, she sees Rhaenyra as “obsessed with masculinity,” equating “maleness” to freedom. “She is a person who feels at odds with the way that she is read by the world — even this label the Realm’s Delight, which implies a passivity, being an object of people’s ogling.”

"It’s like she has a doppelgänger. The doppelgänger is Rhaenyra born male, who has access to all the things that she craves and feels to be hers. She has this amazing connection with her uncle Daemon. In some ways, they’re [of] the same fabric, and yet the rules are completely different [for them]."

Yeah, that “amazing connection” may get a little dicey — I pause here to remind everyone that the Targaryen family is infamously fond of incest — but Daemon (Matt Smith) is definitely a character we’ll remember. Hot-headed and ambitious, Daemon is a skilled warrior and very prone to violence. He’s a thorn in the side of his more even-tempered brother the king, and rides a fierce dragon named Caraxes. “He’s like a huge rabid dog, in many ways, who only calms and soothes around Daemon,” Smith said. “He’s almost an untrainable dragon in many respects.” Much like his rider.

Meet the Hightowers

Another huge player in this drama is Alicent Hightower, King Viserys’ second wife and the mother of Rhaenyra’s main rival for the Iron Throne. (Like Rhaenyra, Alicent has two actors playing her: Emily Carey as a young woman and Olivia Cooke as an adult.) Although Alicent is technically Rhaenyra’s step-mother, they’re actually around the same age (Rhaenyra’s mother dies and her dad remarries to a younger woman; we’ve all heard that one). Alicent has lived at court since childhood, and the pair become good friends in their youth…but as adults, they’re bitter enemies.

“Friendship is such a wild, intense journey,” Carey said. “You feel so much at that age for your friends. That was definitely something that we played around with. They go through a lot as people, individually and together. Their relationship with each other changes them as the story line continues.”

The two are different; Rhaenyra is a free spirit who’s being groomed for leadership, while Alicent is “an anxious rule-follower” being groomed by her father Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) to marry a powerful man and influence events from behind the scenes, which is more traditional for a well-born woman in Westeros. There may be some resentment there. “When you realize that you haven’t been nurtured in the way that Rhaenyra has — her best friend that she’s seen grow up, have everything given to her, and had the unbridled love of her father — that is a real tough pill to swallow,” Cooke said.

However you slice it, these two are at the center of the show’s conflict. “They are central female characters who are at once credited and also blamed with this particular war,” Condal said. “Because the history is written by men, we were really interested in the dynamic forces that a certain medieval level of innate chauvinism puts on the two women.”

Meet the Velaryons

There are, of course, other characters; it wouldn’t be a Game of Thrones spinoff without a sprawling cast. There’s Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best), who was passed over to become queen during a great council that happened around the time Rhaenyra was born. That wound still rankles years later, and it bleeds into Rhaenys’ relationship with her younger cousin Rhaenyra, who is actively being groomed for the throne. “There’s an element of mentorship. There’s also an element of other things that go along with that, potentially friendship or sympathy,” Best said. “At the same time, there’s all kinds of other, much darker things. Especially at the beginning, I think Rhaenys feels that [Rhaenyra] needs some taking-down a peg or two.”

Rhaenys is married to Corlys Velaryon, aka the Sea Snake, who’s kind of the Tywin Lannister of his day; actor Steve Toussiant even auditioned with a Tywin scene. At this point, House Velaryon is the richest house in the Seven Kingdoms, and Corlys has big plans for what comes next. “[The Targaryens] have dragons, but still they don’t want to lose the whole ocean, which he commands,” Toussaint said. “He knows he has power, and he knows that they need him… He’s this fearless guy. He’s very rich now. He likes people to see that he’s rich. But you, as the actor, have to find a way to humanize it.”

"Sea Snake is a father and wants what he thinks is the best for his children…But of course he has this huge ambition. This idea of legacy, it’s a big deal for him."

The biggest difference between Tywin and Corlys may be that Corlys is in a loving relationship with his wife; in fact, it’s so mutually supportive and healthy it almost doesn’t feel like it belongs on this show. “Sea Snake and his wife are the ones you most root for because they’re actually about love,” Toussaint said. And of course, that means that Corlys hasn’t forgotten his wife being snubbed for the throne years earlier…

Another notable thing about Corlys is that he (and his siblings and children) is played by a Black actor. Martin doesn’t really mention Corlys’ race in Fire & Blood, so there was some ambiguity to play with, and both Condal and his co-showrunner Miguel Sapochnik cared about their show having a diverse cast. “It was very important for Miguel and I to create a show that was not another bunch of white people on the screen,” he said. “We wanted to find a way to put diversity in the show, but we didn’t want to do it in a way that felt like it was an afterthought or, worse, tokenism.”

So why cast the Velaryon family specifically with Black actors? As it ends up, the idea came out of conversations with George R.R. Martin. According to Condal, Martin toyed early on with the idea of making the Velaryons Black conquerors who arrived in Westeros from the west. That stuck with Condal, and everything else followed. “Once we had that idea, it just felt like everything fell into place,” Condal recalls.

House of the Dragon release date on HBO and HBO Max

House of the Dragon has a lot of eyes on it, but so far, things are looking incredibly promising. From the cast to the story to new Iron Throne — which has so many new swords around it that they had to erect a sign that read “Warning: Risk of Impalement” — this is a show I am very excited to watch.

House of the Dragon premieres on HBO and HBO Max on August 21.

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