Alys Rivers may be 400 years old on House of the Dragon?

Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) has been an interesting new addition to this season of House of the Dragon. She's a healer living and working at the massive, crumbling, quite possibly haunted castle of Harrenhal, where Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) is trying to raise an army. There's a lot we don't know about her. Are the potions she's mixing for Daemon giving him his strange dreams? Is she literally magic, getting news before it arrives by raven, or just highly intuitive?

Right now, the ambiguity is the point. "It’s a thing I was struggling with every day. How do you play someone who is mysterious? How do you ground them, and make her a person with wants and needs and desires?" Rankin told Vulture. "As this season unfolds, you start to feel like there’s a story there, a person and a history. I know it. It was really personal. That was a lot of work I had to do privately, and hopefully we’ll feel and see more specific details at some point."

By the sound of it, some of those details could be pretty weird. Rankin makes a couple of references to Alys being older than she looks. "She’s kind of like the First Lady of Harrenhal, if there was a government," she said. "She knows all the really wonderful spots to go swimming and do fun, pleasurable things. She’s spent a lot of time figuring out how to be by herself, but that’s like a blessing and a curse after 400 years."

"I do believe she’s a maester of sorts, and a healer in many senses of the word. Whether or not Alys’s potions are actually potions, she’s kept Harrenhal on its feet for generations, in terms of just like, keeping people alive — or not."

It's hard to tell if Rankin is being colorful when she hints that Alys has been around for "400 years" and has minded Harrenhal for "generations," or if she's really saying that Alys has been alive for centuries. In George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, there is some ambiguity about how old Alys is; some of the more salacious rumors say she bathes in the blood of virgins to stay young, but I don't think many people would pay those rumors too much mind.

Are Alys Rivers and Melisandre the same person?

On Game of Thrones, we met another character who was centuries old: Melisandre, the Red Witch who tried to help Stannis Baratheon come to power before switching her allegiance to Jon Snow. Some fans have even theorized that Alys and Melisandre are the same person, but Rankin seems to put the kibosh on that idea at least:

"I would say that there are no other characters that have been repeated in the House of the Dragon world, so I’m not sure why we would start now."

That's one mystery down, 100 to go. Maybe we'll learn more about Alys when House of the Dragon drops a new episode this Sunday night on HBO and Max.

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