How House of the Dragon built, improved and executed on the character of Baela Targaryen

Like Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon has an ensemble cast. We're getting to know a lot of secondary characters better in season 2, including Daemon Targaryen's daughters Baela (Bethany Antonia) and Rhena (Phoebe Campbell). In the most recent episode, "The Burning Mill," Rhaena is packed off to the Vale with a cache of dragon eggs while Baela scouts for enemy troops on her dragon Moondancer. I still don't think either of the characters are quite popping off the screen in the same way that, for example, Arya and Sansa did back on Game of Thrones, but this was a step forward.

And I give a lot of credit for that step to director Geeta Patel, who talked to Screenrant about building out these characters behind the scenes. "One of the things that I felt very strongly about is that, in order to care about the scene [where Baela encounters Criston Cole while riding her dragon], you have to care about Baela. And we've never known her; we didn't know who she was," Patel said. "We needed to introduce Baela here, but as usual, we had to do it without words. That's what we do on this show; we don't do exposition, so the bar is very high. I sat down with the actors who played Baela and Rhaena, and we did this improvisation exercise for a very long time where they both had to go back to who they were as kids. I pitched them the idea that Rhaena always straight straight A's but never got a dragon, while Baela has never done anything right and has always been an iconoclast, and she got a dragon. That's not fair."

Baela and Rhaena both seem a little generic to me, but they started to come alive in this episode in particular, and it sounds like a lot of that came down to Patel, Campbell and Antonia taking initiative. "Then they started building their characters and how they were as kids, and we all started pitching ideas to the writer. We started really crafting with the writers and the producers, and it was a wonderful war room of all of us crafting the layers of Baela and Rhaena that we needed to make them human and to have them each have this pivotal dramatic pain in their childhood. I won't tell you what it is, but they both built it. When we got to Baela on that dragon, it wasn't about, 'I'm on a dragon, and I see these guys below.' It was about more than that."

"[Showrunner Ryan Condal] and the writers' team really took it to heart as far as introducing Baela, and they went across the entire season adding another layer of her; just little finesses. And so did Bethany [Antonia], the actor who plays Baela; we were all working together. She also started chiming in, "Well, this is what I think I would do here.""

This really highlights what a collaborative effort making TV is. It doesn't end with the writer writing something the director and actors then put on the screen; they have a say too. All of this resulted in Baela's best scene so far on the show: when she's reporting back to Rhaenyra on Criston's movements and freely admits that she got right up in Criston's face despite Rhaenyra apparently telling her not to engage. Obviously, Baela is someone who likes to push boundaries. "We tried to drive that home, so when she gets close and breaks the rules, she's Maverick," Patel said. "We needed that sentence to have a beginning, middle, and end there."

Baela and Rhaena will crop up again in the second season of House of the Dragon, which drops new episodes on Sunday nights on HBO and Max. If you've read George R.R. Martin's book Fire & Blood, you know they stick around for a long while, and I hope the cast and crew continue to collaborate to make them as interesting as possible.

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