House of the Dragon’s Mysaria will “veer quite far away” from the book

HBO’s highly-anticipated Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon is less than two weeks away. Set some 200 years before the original show, House of the Dragon will cover a brutal Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. But it won’t just be Targaryens in the mix. One non-Targaryen character who will be deeply involved is Mysaria, played by Sonoya Mizuno. Mysaria begins the story as a paramour of Daemon Targaryen, but becomes one of the most integral players in the Dance by the time it reaches its bloodiest stages. Think of her as this show’s Varys.

Mizuno was one of the few main cast members not present for the show’s Los Angeles world premiere; she’s currently starring in an off-Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof while simultaneously filming a movie directed by Randall Park (Fresh Off The Boat, WandaVision). She’ll be joining the cast for the London premiere later this month, but in the meantime she caught up with Women’s Wear Daily to talk about playing one of the slyest characters in Westeros.

Mysaria will be quite different than the character in Fire & Blood

“I think the appealing thing about House of the Dragon is that it’s not as sprawling as Game of Thrones. It’s about one family, and it’s much more contained, and the drama all happens within the family,” Mizuno explained. “For me, that’s always more interesting because otherwise there are too many people, too many beards.”

There were indeed quite a few people with quite a few beards in Game of Thrones. Mizuno didn’t watch the original series when it was on, but once she got deep into the audition process for House of the Dragon she decided to give it a watch. “I could understand very quickly why people became so obsessed with it.”

Mysaria appears in George R.R. Martin’s “fake history” book Fire & Blood, but it sounds like the show will be exploring some new territory for me. “My character veers quite far away from the character in the book,” Mizuno said. “That is both liberating and a challenge for me and the director. Liberating in the sense that we had more free rein, but also it still had to have a kind of framework.”

It would make sense for the show to flesh out Mysaria more at this early stage of the story, since she doesn’t really become a prominent figure into further along in the Dance of the Dragons. It certainly sounds like she’ll have quite a lot to deal with. “She’s a self-made woman who is also making a lot of mistakes in the first season. It felt like she was going on a journey of understanding who she was and what she wanted in her life, and making mistakes,” Mizuno said.

"There was something very human about her journey. It felt very relatable in terms of being a woman in her 20s and 30s and learning what you want and not pleasing other people, and realizing where your power truly lies rather than where you thought it lies when you were 22. Those feelings and experiences that we go through are so human, it doesn’t matter where it is — what type of planet, what era, or what have you. They’re so human, and they don’t really go away."

Given some of the trouble that Daemon and Mysaria get into, it sounds like she’s got quite a ride ahead of her House of the Dragon season 1. And apparently she’ll even be on dragonback! “I had a lot of fun,” Mizuno said. “And, you know, I got to ride some dragons, so that was cool.”

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

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