Steve Toussaint plays experienced seafarer Corlys Velaryon on House of the Dragon. In the first season, we watched Corlys' life play out over several years; he lost both of his adult children, and at the end of the season lost one of his grandchildren. He's been through it, and will likely still be smarting when the show returns for a third season.
Looking back on season 2, Toussaint named the loss of Corlys' wife Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) as the thing he remembers most. "I know it sounds silly because we're just acting, but it's the most wrenching thing that she will not be there to continue the journey with me and the rest of us," he told Gold Derby. "And then it's trying to portray several kinds of grief throughout the season, because at the beginning, he's still grieving his children and his grandchild, and then in the middle of that season — wham! The one person he trusts above all else, the one person he can completely relax and be himself with, the one person we ever see him really smile and laugh with, is now gone. So yeah, that was a challenge."
Rhaenys Targaryen died in a dragon-vs-dragon battle above the keep of Rook's Rest in "The Red Dragon and the Gold," the best episode of the season. Her last day on set wasn't as spectacular, but the emotions were real. "We had to reshoot a scene, the one when she's about to go and do that mission. And we didn't realize it was her last day, because everything's shot out of sequence," Toussaint remembered. "So we did that scene, and then the director, Alan Taylor, said, 'OK, and that's Eve's last day.' And we're like, 'Oh my God, no!' There were tears on my part. I've been on record before saying that after the first day we ever shot together, I went home and said, 'Thank God for Eve Best.' When we first met, within about five or 10 minutes, we were hugging each other. In a business full of lovely, charismatic people, to have a connection like that with somebody is still a rarity. And so I'm very thankful that I got to work with her, and hopefully we'll work with her again."
Steve Toussaint was surprising by this Corlys Velaryon plot twist
Corlys honored Rhaenys by taking his flagship, The Sea Snake, and renaming it The Queen Who Never Was, a moniker Rhaenys held ever since her cousin Viserys was chosen to rule the Seven Kingdoms over her, many years ago. "The Sea Snake" is also Corlys' nickname, so expect that to recur. "I was having this conversation on set just a couple of days ago with Sonoya Mizuno, who plays Mysaria, and she was saying, 'Oh my God, you've got such a cool nickname!' Her nickname is the White Worm. [laughs] I said, 'Yeah, I win,'" he remembered.
Corlys renaming his ship suggests he's becoming a little less self-aggrandizing, but Toussaint assures Gold Derby that Corlys is still preoccupied with the idea of legacy. "One of the things that he's doing, certainly throughout Season 2, and for a majority of what we're shooting so far, is trying to secure his legacy. He's lost everybody, and so he's trying to reconcile. I think he would like to somehow find peace with that aspect of his life," he said.
In season 2, Corlys also dealt with his illegitimate sons Alyn and Addam of Hull (Abubakar Salim and Clinton Liberty) coming back into his life. "We had built Corlys up to be this man of virtue and so forth, and he was one of the few men in the world who really loved his wife, who really respected his wife, who really took on her advice and so forth, and then suddenly to find out that? You're like, 'Oh, wow!'" Toussaint remembered. "As the performer, I had to go through a biography for myself as to how this happened. It's not that he had an affair and had a child, but that he had two children with this person. He came back and continued this thing. I still maintain that Rhaenys was the woman that he loved. But yes, it did take a little bit of mental working out for me to get my mind around the timeline for him."
House of the Dragon is based on a book called Fire & Blood; in that book, Addam and Alyn's mother Marilda of Hull is alive, whereas on the show she's dead; it's a bit of a loss, since Marilda is an interesting character on the page. In any case, I never found it hard to believe that Corlys might have another family; he loved Rhaenys, but he also had a very high opinion of himself and his own greatness, and it's pretty easy for folks like that to justify whatever choices they make to themselves as being part of their bigger destiny.
In any case, Corlys will forge ahead in House of the Dragon season 3, which will air on HBO and Max sometime next year. It sounds like he'll be in the thick of the action very early on:
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