[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for House of the Dragon Season 2 Episode 4, “A Dance of Dragons.”]
It’s the moment every Fire & Blood reader has been dreading. As the Targaryen civil war reached a tipping point and the greens went after Rook’s Rest, the home of Team Black ally Lord Staunton (Michael Elwyn), Rhaenys (Eve Best) offered to go to the crownlands on behalf of Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy).
Aboard Meleys, her beloved dragon, Rhaenys made it to Rook’s Rest only to be ambushed by Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), and their dragons. The formidable Rhaenys refused to back down from the fight and charged forth with Meleys in a brutal battle across the sky. After Aegon and Sunfyre went down (thanks to Aemond), Rhaenys and Meleys were blindsided in a sneak attack from Vhagar and Aemond.
As Vhagar viciously attacked Meleys, Rhaenys had to watch on in horror. When it became clear that Meleys would die, Rhaenys let go of her saddle and looked to the clear sky above as she plummeted to her death alongside her dragon. Below, Best spoke with TV Insider about Rhaenys’ sacrifice, her last piece of wisdom to Rhaenyra, and why The Queen Who Never Was never feared death.
When Rhaenys offered to go to Rook’s Rest, was she prepared to die?
Eve Best: Absolutely, and in fact, more than that, I think she absolutely knows that it’s a kamikaze mission. But even more to the point, I feel like for her, it has to be a sacrifice. Out of everybody in the whole of Season 2, from the moment that she chose not to start nuclear war at the end of Episode 9 [of Season 1], she has been campaigning and steering everybody to the best of her ability away from dragon warfare. She’s done everything she can. She, of all of them, knows from bitter life experience. She and Corlys are the only grown-ups left in the room at this point, and they’re the only ones who really understand the weight of what it is that they’re standing on the brink of. The young ones just have no experience of it. This realm has had 70 years of total peace. Nobody’s got any idea of what it actually means to go through this. Nobody knows the extent of the horror that dragon warfare/nuclear warfare is going to unleash. She’s done everything to prevent it, and now at this point where it’s inevitable, it’s the only step that can be taken.
She knows because she’s got this chivalric code. Somebody described her as like Lancelot. She’s like Rhaenyra’s Lancelot tonight. That seems so right that she’s got that code of a knight or a samurai. She knows that the only person that could really press that red button is her. She knows that as a tactician because she’s the most experienced. She’s the one within whose hands there will be the least bloodshed. It’ll be the most efficient and the most immediate way to if it has to be done. She’s the one person who can do it in an efficient way. And more than that, the momentousness of doing this act, of pressing the red button, by its very nature, has to be a sacrificial act because you can’t live after doing that. You can’t live with yourself, and you can’t walk away from it. She knows that she’s just going to have to take one for the team. I think she makes absolute light of it, like, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back in time for tea.” But deep down, it’s the most momentous decision that can be made. She knows it’s got to be a sacrifice. I think that the only being with whom she can share that with is her dragon.
Was anything changed over the course of making Episode 4?
When she was putting herself forward with Rhaenyra and the council, her line originally was, “Send me.” Jace is wanting to go. The young ones are all kind of angling for a fight. Rhaenyra sort of wanted to go but not so experienced enough. In the original, Rhaenys said, “Send me,” which is great, but there’s something a little bit open-ended about it. Sara [Hess], the writer, suggested, “Why don’t you try, ‘You must send me,’” which is brilliant. It’s final, and it’s also an instruction; it’s like her last piece of wisdom to Rhaenyra. It’s her last piece of guidance before they all plunge into the abyss. She’s saying, “Look, this is how you lead. This is how you rule.”
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At Rook’s Rest, Rhaenys gets caught off guard when Aegon and Sunfyre arrive. When it was just them, do you think Rhaenys thought she could kill Aegon and walk away unscathed?
I think that’s absolutely right. When Aegon arrives, she doesn’t want to do it because, after all, he’s a nephew. He’s a relatively innocent sort of idiot. It’s just like, “Okay, we could just deal with him, wipe him out, and then all of this is over.” It would be so relatively straightforward. But then, when Vhagar enters the fray, it just takes everything to a whole different level. That’s when it just spirals out of control. She has that moment when she could leave, but it’s the noble warrior in her. She just turns and goes, “No, I have to go back in.” Not for herself. She knows there’s pretty much no way that that can be survived, but she has to do it because she’s programmed like the noble warrior. It’s the honorable thing to do. She has to do everything she can to stop this, and if there’s a chance to stop Vhagar, then it has to be taken.
Aemond tries to kill Aegon during the dragon fight. Do you think Rhaenys recognized what Aemond was doing in the moment?
I think so. I think that also plays into another reason for her going back in. It just is more fuel to try and separate those two and deal with Vhagar. It’s like watching a rabid dog maul a smaller dog. There’s just something in her that is like, that can’t happen. That’s not a fair fight.
After Rhaenys and Meleys fight Aemond and Vhagar in the air, there’s a moment of reprieve. Rhaenys and Meleys are headed toward the water. Was she headed back to Dragonstone? I feel like Rhaenys was well aware that Vhagar was still out there.
I think it was just the momentary thought of, let’s get out of the immediate arena and go regroup. But she doesn’t get far enough for it to be a fully-fledged [idea of] let’s go back and escape. Even if there was an initial instinct to just move away from the red hot zone, that very quickly turns to plunging back in because that’s what has to be done at a moral level.
Vhagar went in for the kill right after that. As Vhagar was killing Meleys, Rhaenys knew exactly what was happening. Given their bond, do you think Rhaenys accepted her fate when Meleys was dying?
I think she’d accepted hers. I think the hardest thing of all of the whole sequence, of the whole season, the whole moment, was watching her dragon be mauled and dying in front of her, knowing that there was nothing she could do, feeling that it was her fault and that she’d somehow let down Meleys. Throughout Season 2, she lost the one person who was her rock. She and Corlys went through loss after loss after loss in Season 1. They went through it as a team. And then in Season 2, with the re-emergence of this past relationship of Corlys’, which is so painful to her. He was her rock, and he’s now starting to crack. She’s become more and more isolated and more and more low, until her only ally and her only friend is Meleys. It was really important to me to just chart that as much as possible, like those little moments just before they’re going off to Rook’s Rest. She says in High Valyrian, “It’s time to go off to battle, old girl.” They just share that moment together because there’s such an intimacy. It’s an umbilical cord link between them. I think, at that point, her own fate means less. It’s what’s going on with Meleys that’s agony. It’s the ultimate devastation. In a way, as it happens, it’s like it’s happening to Rhaenys, too. It’s like the life is being eaten out of her in a way. It felt like when she lets go, because she’s clinging on to Meleys’ saddle, and the moment that she lets go, there’s this peacefulness and acceptance that we did the best we could.
There’s a beautiful stoicism on Rhaenys’ face when she lets go. There’s a freedom there. She’s not afraid of dying.
Absolutely. It was such a surrender, and it felt like such a release and such a relief because she’s been carrying everything since Season 1. Right at the beginning, that appalling injustice of what happened to her, and then the continued barrage of loss after grief, after death, after abandonment, and just building up and up and up of what she’s had to hold on to really. In Season 2, she holds on for everybody else, too, while everyone else unravels around her, with such absolute grace and stoicism. It’s been this heavy, heavy, heavy burden that she’s held because nobody’s ever seen for a second [anything else]. She’s always put aside her own stuff, and she’s just been holding on so tight. I felt like that letting go was the most unbelievable relief. Finally, she was free.
Do you think Rhaenys died thinking Rhaenyra would be able to win this war?
I think she lets go of even that thought. I think that’s not important by that point.
It’s up to the gods.
It’s up to the gods. That’s part of letting go. It’s like, what will be, will be. It’s letting go of any sense of control or any idea of controlling the outcome. That was very similar to my experience as an actor filming it. There’d been a lot of pressure on this moment and a huge build-up in terms of time and emotional build-up. It happened to be the very last shot that I filmed, apart from one tiny little thing that we had to do, but it was the last significant moment that I was filming. So it was my last day on set, and Ryan [Condal] had given a big speech. There was a real mounting pressure. By the time we got to it, I was like a pressure cooker about to burst. I thought, “God, we’ve got to hope there’s going to be time to spend on this moment and make it really as important as it needs to be and work through it. I’ve got to really deliver.” All those kinds of things are flying through your mind. We got to it, and it was over in a flash. We did two takes, and the director was like, “Yeah, I’m happy. That’s good.” That felt like a microcosm correlating to Rhaenys’ experience of, “Well, it’s out of my hands very literally. I don’t have control over this anymore and thank God.”
House of the Dragon, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO, Streaming on Max