Interview: Eve Best on Dragon Riding, Targaryen Psychological Warfare and Rhaenys’s Fate in ‘House of the Dragon’

[Warning: heavy spoilers below]

For fans of Game of Thrones and the subsequent prequel series House of the Dragon, perhaps one of the greatest wishes the audience has been asking to be granted to see is dragons fighting in the sky. The fourth episode of House of the Dragon, “The Red Dragon and the Gold,” was an answer to fans questioning when it would finally happen. The Battle at Rook’s Rest, a battle fans familiar with George R.R. Martin’s Targaryen history book (and where the prequel series draws from as source material), Fire & Blood, will already know much about. Ser Criston Cole drew attention to his army at Rook’s Rest to draw his enemies dragons out, with one taking his bait: Rhaenys Targaryen on the back of Meleys. Meeting Meleys in the sky is Aegon upon Sunfyre and Aemond upon Vhagar, the former alone possibly a foe Meleys could have handled, but Vhagar’s size proves impossible for the smaller dragon to best. Vhagar kills Meleys hundreds of feet above the ground and forces her to fall to her death on top of her rider, Rhaenys Targaryen, the Queen Who Never Was.

Rhaenys has been a source of constraint and wisdom for Rhaenyra since the throne was usurped, but the past few episodes have shown how invaluable Rhaenys is around her hot-heated family members. Behind Rhaenys is a stage and TV veteran, Eve Best, who holds Tony nominations for her work in productions of both A Moon for the Misbegotten and The Homecoming. Known also for her role in Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, Best has provided audiences with a dragonrider that gave us last season’s greatest moment when she and her dragon came through the floor during Aegon’s coronation. Rhaenys is a character whose presence will be missed, for there will surely be less rationality provided by the rest of Rhaenyra’s council. It’s a death that will ignite the fire of the rest of the war, where chaos will now surely take over.

I sat down with Best to discuss being a dragonrider, comparisons between fictional families, and the filming of the Battle at Rook’s Rest. 

Tyler Doster: How far into getting this role did you learn about how Rhaenys dies?

Eve Best: Well, I knew that she was going to die when I took the job because we were only signed up for two seasons, so I knew that her time was limited. And then I guess… So, yeah, I just didn’t know what the details were going to be, and then it was about halfway through the second season and they’d given us a copy of the book and I wasn’t going to read it because I thought it might be distracting, but then a couple of the others were reading it and I thought, oh, well, maybe I’ll just, I cracked, I’ll just have a little, see what happens. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I flipped through to see her bits and so I saw the progress of what happened so then, I knew the trajectory, I just didn’t know the exact details and how it was going to be shot and everything.

TD: Getting into character for Rhaenys, what was more crucial: the costume or the wig?

EB: Gosh, I mean, I think both [are] tied equal. I guess probably the wig, maybe by a nose, because it’s such a big deal putting it on and it’s like a two and a half – well, it feels like a two and a half hour process. It’s a nearly two hour process, lots of different layers because I’ve got long hair and they’ve got to pin all that up and then put a bald cap on and then do paint. It’s a really elaborate procedure. And so then by the end of all of that, and because of the way it’s dressed and everything. But actually, to be honest, I don’t really feel 100% in character, I think, really, until we’re doing it, until the cameras roll, because there’s so much other stuff to think about.

TD: How long did it take to film specifically the battle at Rook’s Rest, and what was the process of filming your fall on Meleys?

EB: So that was a long time to do the whole sequence because we had to do it all individually. So the boys had got them in and filmed their bit and then I had to do my part, my section. And that was two weeks solid of me on the buck, which is what they call the machine that we use to simulate the moves. Yeah, so it was two weeks solid all day, just me, and that was quite intense. Because, basically, it’s just like this big, moving, sort of electronic [thing], sort of like the size of a small cottage or a house really. And you climb up some steps to get to it and there’s a saddle and you’re strapped into the saddle and then they take the steps away and everyone leaves and you’re left on the top of this roof, effectively the roof of this small house. And then the house starts to move and they plot, they divide, so they divided the whole fight sequence into little sections and they film each section one at a time. But it takes a really long time because they have to do a lot of, have to do a lot of checks and a lot of safety checks and everything has to be gone through with the stunt person before I do it.

And it was elaborate, it got increasingly elaborate as it went on because, seeing the sequence, there are quite a lot of spins and there’s one point when she’s hanging upside down and I’m not really used to stunts and it’s not my comfort zone. So they did a move that was like a 180 degree turn to try and simulate the moment she’s hanging upside down, and so I started off vertical to the ground, clinging on for dear life, praying to God that my thighs were going to hold me still. And then they swooped around and did a 180 degree turn and I was vertically left there. And then they said cut and the machine, I was still vertical to the ground. The machine didn’t right itself straight away. There was a delay. So I was stuck like that. And then everyone else had moved off, and I was hanging on the side, was kind of like a prawn on the side of a ship going, “Help, help. Let me down.”

TD: “Come get me, come get me!”

EB: (laughs) “Don’t forget about me!”

TD: “I’m still up here!”

EB: I know, exactly, my feet and my core muscles were really getting the work out of their life and I was probably going to come to a bit of a sick end a bit too soon. But yeah, it was intense. But then also because on top of all that physical stuff, which is like I said is not really my comfort zone, but it was having to also chart her emotional journey, which is quite a lot going on for her. So yeah, it was a tough time, but yeah, amazing. The crew were amazing.

TD: Do you find any similarities in the dysfunction of familial tension between the Targaryens and say the central family in [Pinter’s] The Homecoming?

EB: Gosh, that’s such an interesting question and I’d never thought about that. And I think that’s really spot on. That’s a very interesting observation. I think there’s a great deal of similarity. I mean, in those, I remember when we did that play, there’s something that Harold Pinter said about family life, I’m sure you probably know, but he described family life as psychological warfare. And that felt incredibly apt for that particular family and very apt for the Targaryens, particularly when you’re throwing in dragons. But the level of the sort of nuclear violence that goes on within families, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re in Targaryens with dragons or whether you’re a house in the middle of England.

There are still the same conflicts and the same tensions and the same struggles for power that exist. They’re universal. And I think it’s why King Lear is viewed by so many people as the greatest play because it’s the play that everybody connects with because everybody relates in some way, shape or form to family life. That very, very complicated and murky territory that we all understand. In fact, we had, there was a press day at the end of season one where one of the, we were talking about exactly that, although he hadn’t picked up on your brilliant point, but he described Targaryen family life as Italian Christmas Eve, and that’s exactly the same thing.

TD: Do you think the Targaryen’s relationship with this kind of deity status kind of fuels that argument further basically?

EB: In terms of they’re more dangerous on a global scale because they have, I think the intensity of the relationships. That was what I was trying to say just now with the point about The Homecoming is that they don’t have dirty status in a worldly context. However, within the framework of the play, it is like their planets colliding. They have the same, because the intensity of emotion is exactly the same. The difference with the Targaryens is that they have the power to destroy the world because of the situation which makes them intensely dangerous.

And when we were talking about the context of the plane, I asked [showrunner] Ryan [Condal], “what’s the context when we’re talking about?” [because] so much of season two is talking about dragon warfare and trying to avoid it, in particular Rhaenys spends the entire season two trying desperately to get to steer everyone away from dragon warfare because she and Corlys are probably the only grownups left in the room and they’re the people who absolutely understand at a core level from life experience, bitter life experience which the young ones just don’t have, the terrifying nature of what they’re standing on the edge of: the potential that there is for nuclear war. And that’s what Ryan said immediately: “dragon warfare is the equivalent to nuclear war.” And that’s a very good useful framework because it then, for us,  just takes on that same resonance.

TD: Rhaenys held so much together with her wisdom and with just keeping that kind of side of the house together, what do you think the biggest impact is going to be on the interpersonal relationships after her death?

EB: I think they’ll be lost without her, and I think they’ll probably spiral quite rapidly into very dangerous and poisonous territory. I mean, it’s the nature of the beast. (laughs) It doesn’t take a genius to work out that within the franchise it’s only going to go downhill from now on. So I’m pretty sure that without her as that amazing kind of rock and beacon and wise force as well as unbelievably sassy, cool badass that she was, that she managed to combine, that she was an enlightened presence amidst all this sort of idiocy and I mean they’re in for a really rough time. (laughs)

TD: I think so, too. I want to take you back a little bit and ask you if Dr. Eleanor O’Hara from Nurse Jackie was watching this show, who do you think she’d be rooting for?

EB: Rhaenys, obviously. Obviously, I think they’re separated at birth, those two. I mean when I was talking with the writers of Nurse Jackie about O’Hara, really early days and the showrunner said the thing about O’Hara is that she’s very, very evolved. And that was just great because that’s absolutely true, that character is why I just adored playing her and I feel so much that Rhaenys is treading in those shoes as well. She’s a highly evolved being. And yeah, I think she’d be riding tandem on the dragon saying, “come on, where next?” 

I think she might have advised Rhaenys because Rhaenys’s sort of inner eye roll in season two was never far away. And I feel like when she persuaded Corlys at the end of season one that they’ve got to stay and do the right thing. Corlys was all for going back to Driftmark and she was like, “no, we’ve got to stay and back Rhaenyra because that’s the right thing to do.” I’m pretty sure that in season two she was just really regretting that choice, “Just wishing that they were back in Driftmark. And I think O’Hara would’ve rocked up and said, come on, Rhaenys, let’s just go and have cocktails at Driftmark. Fuck this lot.”

TD: O’Hara wouldn’t have had any of this and said, “I think we need to just batten down right here and have a quick drink.”

EB: Yeah, have several quick drinks and don’t give a shit about any of them. They’re all a load of tossers.

TD: Maybe the drink isn’t even so quick.

EB: No, exactly, lengthy drinks. And I think that she would’ve scooped her up and taken her off to an island in the Caribbean with probably the twins, Erryk and Arryk, and they would have had a lovely foursome altogether.

TD: I think that is an incredible narrative we can give people.

EB: You know, why not? (laughs)

Photo:Ollie Upton/HBO