House of the Dragon star Eve Best breaks down Rhaenys Targaryen's last stand

In the latest episode of House of the Dragon, "The Red Dragon and the Gold," Rhaenys Targaryen took wing for the last time. She died after the end of a spectacular dragon-vs-dragon battle that pitted her against two of her cousins: Aegon Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) on his dragon Sunfyre and Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) on his dragon Vhagar. In the end, Rhaenys and her dragon Meleys lost the battle. They crashed to the ground, dead.

According to actor Eve Best, Rhaenys knew this would probably be her last flight when she left Dragonstone to engage the enemy. "[E]ffectively, she’s starting a nuclear war, and she has been the one character throughout who’s done everything she can to stop them," she told Variety. "Because she’s the one that knows from bitter experience, and all the younger generation are running around, saying 'Send in the dragons!' She and [her husband Corlys Velaryon] are really the only adults left in the room who know, who’ve been there and seen it — what they’re facing."

"The point is, ultimately, whatever we feel, however attached and however devastated we may be, the bigger picture is we must not send dragons into war, we must not go nuclear at all costs. So for her then to say, “I will be the one to do this,” she knows that there’s no living after that. The choice to go, that second return to plunge in with Vhagar — that’s an absolute kamikaze mission. To me, that was when she felt very samurai. It was that last stand of the noble warrior. She could have just about escaped, and they could have maybe left everybody to deal with it. But she turns because she knows that’s what she has to do, morally and spiritually."

Best points out that Rhaenys pointedly does not burn her enemies when she has the chance at the end of season 1, so her making the decision to fly to war once there's no other choice carries a lot of weight. "Everybody’s taking it personal, and she’s all the time looking at the bigger picture. All the time rising up, putting the personal aside, and rising above."

How Rhaenys Targaryen is like Hillary Clinton

More practically, actually filming the dragon battle gave Best quite a workout as she clung to the bucking bronco-like apparatus that stands in for a dragon behind the scenes. "Pilates, eat your heart out! " she quipped. "I definitely kept asking for more cushions, and needed more padding on my knees and feeling very ill-equipped to cope with all of this. And at the same time as it’s moving, they’ve got four guys with enormous leaf blowers blowing wind in your face. You can hardly hear a thing because there’s all this sound of the wind, and then you’ve got a director yelling into a microphone somewhere in the distance. 'Look up! There’s Vhagar! Aemond’s coming in!' And you can hardly think straight. You’re thinking, 'I’ve got this really intense moment for Rhaenys, and I’ve got to focus,' but you’re just clinging on for dear life in some cases.'"

Through the exertion, Best added her own flair to the scene; it was her idea for Rhaenys to let her arms fly loose as she took her final fall, knowing that this was the end. After carrying the burden of being the one arguing against going nuclear all this time, there may have been some tranquility in that final moment. "She lets go literally and spiritually. It was a real surrender," Best told Deadline.

Of course, had Rhaenys been installed as the queen of the Seven Kingdoms years ago, it's very possible none of this would have happened; the Great Council chose her cousin Viserys to sit the Iron Throne instead, and we all saw how that turned out. "That’s the backbone of this story … the woman being passed over for the sake of the man, the woman who is eminently more qualified for the job," Best said. "And in fact, when we started shooting, Sara Hess, Ryan’s lead co-writer, straight away said to me, ‘there’s a lot of Hillary Clinton going on with her.’ And that just feels so right. The person who is absolutely clearly the most intelligent, the most expert, the most qualified, the most temperamentally and intellectually suited for this role being sidelined because of her sex, and then witnessing it happening again potentially with Rhaenyra [Emma D’Arcy]. There was such a strong feeling of ‘not on my watch, not again shall this story be repeated, we have to change it.’"

Alyn of Hull is "the biggest sword" in Rhaenys Targaryen's heart

This was unquestionably Rhaenys' best episode of the series to date, and it's her last. In addition to her death scene, she got to play some family drama opposite her husband Corlys (Steve Toussaint), who's been keeping his bastard child Alyn of Hull (Abubakar Salim) discreetly hidden on Driftmark for years. So before she died in battle, Rhaenys got to meet her husband's love child, which sounds fun.

"We talked, Steven and I, and we really felt that they had never, it had never been spoken about," Best said. "And yet, absolutely, it’s the biggest sword in her heart, obviously. Up until now, he’d been really her rock, the ground beneath our feet. And feeling that suddenly was unstable, feeling this relationship through the presence of Alyn and Addam suddenly rearing its head again, having been so deeply buried by her, never spoken of by him. He’s in complete denial about it, and it’s absolute agony for her. I really felt like her heart was breaking."

"This time, a chasm opened between them. And yet again with that, she’s hiding it. I wanted to yell at her. “Just talk to him! Have the conversation! Please tell him how you feel!” Because yet again, in spite of the fact that it’s absolutely breaking her apart, to be reminded and to see this — as she imagines — presence of another woman via the illegitimate children, she’s yet again putting that aside and saying to Corlys, “You have to acknowledge and you have to accept that he could be your heir — and you need to do right by him.”

And that’s a classic example of her yet again putting aside her personal grief and her feelings. I think inside, she’s broken and devastated. But always doing the right thing. Never letting anybody, apart from Meleys, see her insides."

This is probably the end for Rhaenys, although it's possible we could see her in a dream sequence or something; Milly Alcock returned as Young Rhaenyra Targaryen, after all. "I’d love her to," Best said. "I think she should haunt [Corlys] like crazy. She should pop up everywhere he goes, giving him all kinds of advice and a piece of her mind...Is he really upset? He better be devastated. He better be crying a lot."

But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we say goodbye to Rhaenys Targaryen, the Queen Who Never Was. "She is a sexy, cool badass," Best said. "I’m going to miss her, too."

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