From May 28-31, downtown Austin swarmed with adult TV campers for ATX TV Festival’s 15th season. Opening night welcomed HBO, a festival sponsor since season one, with a sneak peek of House of the Dragon’s third season. Before the evening’s panel, mxdwn spoke with the attending cast members: Steven Toussaint, Abukabar Salim, Harry Collet and Bethany Antonia.
Toussaint plays Lord Corlys Velaryon, the naval admiral known as the Sea Snake and widower to Rhaenys Targaryen. Salim is Alyn of Hull, Corlys’ estranged illegitimate son, who saved his life in the battle with the Triarchy for the Stepstones. Collet plays Jacaerys “Jace” Velaryon, Rhaenyra’s eldest son and appointed heir. Finally, Bethany Antonia is Baela Targaryen, Daemon’s eldest daughter and Corlys’ granddaughter.
The third season sees the two familial clans, Rhaenyra’s Team Black and Alicent’s Team Green, light the match of war with weapons of mass destruction — dragons. This battle preludes the eventual fall of the Targaryen house. As part of a roundtable interview, the four cast members discussed what to expect from their characters’ dynamics amidst wartime and the anticipated Battle of the Gullet.
mxdwn: So much of this series – and frankly the franchise – is about the sins of an absentee father and the impact on those left behind. Your characters are in the rare situation to be reunited, working through that schism together. How, if at all, do these two subvert that GOT trope, or is it just a twist on the formula?
Steven Toussaint: I think for Corlys, it’s a… it’s a bit of a shift because as far as he’s concerned, this situation and Alyn were the casualties of being a sailor, you know. I had a thing with their mother. Clearly it’s something very important, or reasonably important, because he kept going back. But that was never gonna be the real thing, because the real thing was my real love for my wife. And of course, circumstances mean of course that he loses everybody. And then, the thought of, one of the things that has I think has been constant about Corlys has been this idea about legacy. That I have to leave something here and I have to secure my family. Now, of course, through the the first two seasons he loses just about everybody.
But he still has two sons. And what I like about this dynamic is the fact that Corlys thinks he can just come along and go, ‘Right, I remember you, you’re my son, so let’s get on with it.’ And of course, Alyn, and I’m not speaking for Alyn, but Alyn, being a man who’s made himself and has clearly got this resentment, which is quite understandable. In fact, one thing I remember is being the brunt of that speech that you [Salim] gave in two when you like, ‘This is what I had to put up with, you when you were there with your son.’ And I think it’s a very humbling thing for Corlys. And I think for me, despite the fact that Corlys was an absentee father in the case of these two, what I like about him is that he is prepared to take that. He doesn’t just dismiss it. Because up until Alyn, the only person that Corlys is honest with, completely honest with, was his wife. She was his rock, now she’s no longer there. And he could just all go, ‘I want you to be my heir’, and he says no, he could go, ‘Well fuck off then.’ Who does that?
Abukabar Salim: Repeat the question again?
mxdwn: So you two are reuniting after estrangement, which is sort of a flip on the absentee father trope in the series. How do you think your character is going to deal deal with that?
Salim: I think again, yeah, just kind of riffing off what Steve was saying, it’s…it’s an ever-evolving thing. It’s something that you can never run away from family. I think like as much as you try and, and push them away or try and kind of cut them off, you are always bound to this element, this thing. And I think with Alyn as well, the fact that he is, you know, so closely working and you know, with Corlys, and having it be by his choice or not by his choice, I think it’s one of those ones which, it’s just an ever-evolving thing. And I think as well Alyn’s want or need is essentially to protect — protect himself, protect you know, Adam, his brother, from any sort of external force that he feels is threatening. And I think Corlys is one of those threatening elements, because it’s, I think Corlys is one of the only characters who can make Alyn feel vulnerable because that’s his dad, right? And there is an element of disappointment that he has felt with his dad several times beforehand and now it’s like, ‘Do I open myself up and let myself go? No, I’m not going to.’ But again, like, I think what’s very exciting now about what this season’s about to bring is it puts that to the test. And it really shows like what, where is your limit, you know, what is what is the limit of your pride, of your ego. It’s going to be tested because of the brutality of everything that’s happening.
mxdwn: This question is kind of for both of you. One of the stronger scenes of season two was near the end, where Bethany kinda has to tell, your character, Baela, has to kinda get Jace together because he’s struggling with sort of the decommissioning his mother has put him through, in her words to protect him, but he feels he can do more. How do you think that scene between your characters worked out and what does it say about the women of the realm?
Bethany Antonia: I think we’ve seen them, we’ve watched them grow up together, so they have this relationship where they can just be really honest with each other, in a way that I think sort of is separate from the formalities of the Westeros. You know, the way that they speak to each other usually is quite formal, but with these two they get to just be really honest with each other. So I think she genuinely believes that she can get through to him but it doesn’t seem to be like that.
Harry Collett: It’s nice because a lot of men in the show don’t listen to the women. It’s like, Jace actually can see that he has respect. And it’s like, he actually listens. As much as he probably doesn’t show it, he’s like, ‘Okay, I’ll take this on board.’ But maybe this isn’t a good idea, or maybe that’s a good idea, do know what I mean? Which I feel like is really nice.
Antonia: Yeah, but think Baela comes from a long line of very strong women, and she’s trying her hardest to follow in Rhaenys’s footsteps and to just stand up for what she believes in. So anything she says to Jace is because she cares about him, because she wants what’s best for him. And I think she sort of thinks that she can see beyond his, at times, clouded vision because he’s so close to Rhaenyra that he can’t always see what’s better for the greater good. And I think Bela tries to…
Collett: Take him down a peg.
Antonia: Yeah..she’s like ‘C’mon bub.’
Collett: ‘Your not thinking straight.’
mxdwn: You both have kind of grown up, at this point, you’re kind of separated from your other siblings. What can we expect to see with Rhaena when she comes back where she’s been; and will Jace have time to interact with his younger siblings? What can we expect with that dynamic in season three without spoiling any major things?
Collett: I think in the best way possible, Jace would maybe not — of course he wants to see his younger siblings. I just feel like he is busy with work right now and he knows that they’re safe. So yeah, think he’d rather keep them out of it.
Antonia: I would agree actually about Rhaena. I think as much as she misses her, I think Rhaena not having a dragon means that she actually can’t be here right now. Because we’re sort of in a world where if that’s the side of the family you belong to, you need that as a means of fighting and a means of escaping. So as much as we miss her, I think Rhaena being at the Veil with the boys means that she’s safe, means that she’s out of harm’s way and it means that, in our eyes, when we’ve won the war she can come home and then we can all be back together.
The evening’s panel revealed behind-the-scenes footage of this season’s massive set piece, the Battle of Gullett, which creator and showrunner Ryan Condal described as “the craziest episode of TV he’s ever made.” Toussaint and Salim shared about preparing for the series’ most elaborate action sequence.
Toussaint: It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen on TV. His description is apt. I think from the minute that, certainly in my case, the minute that Loni (director) called me weeks before they built anything and said, ‘Come in, I’m gonna tell you, I wanna talk you through what the battle’s gonna be, what Corlys’s journey through this battle will be, both physically and mentally and emotionally. I was like, ‘My god, this is gonna be quite something’ and he said, ‘Yeah, we’ve not seen this scale on TV before.’ And then of course, you spend weeks rehearsing fight scenes, in a huge gym with wonderful stunt performers. And then you get onto the set and it’s much smaller. And all of those wonderful balletic moves you’re gonna do that are gonna make you look sexy, which you thought were gonna do, they end up being this. [waves his hands frantically like a child having a tantrum]. In my case, anyway.
But yeah, it was amazing to get on that set, to have all this water and blood swathing it around, to have the the the whole thing tilting, have them water cannons firing at you. I mean no acting required, you know, because there are points when you know, when you at least for me, when I imagine battles, sea battles and and fighting, it’s all very smooth and very clean.
Salim: Yeah, but it’s not. [laughs]
Toussaint: But it’s not. And there comes a point in the battle when your character just wants to survive. Just survive so you can have a few seconds to breathe and find out what the hell’s going on. And we did, I think, I mean I haven’t seen it yet, but I think we we did our very best to replicate that feeling.
Salim: Yeah, it was it was madness. Like it was the way I’ve described it before is it was organized chaos. Like you think you have a plan and then suddenly you’re on there and the plan is gone. Like you can only trust that the team around you are all sort of in the same boat, and trying to survive and trying to figure it out. And like I will always remember, you know, again, that same feeling of like, you’ve done all the rehearsals in this big gym, then you get on the boat, and the first time that Loni shouted ‘Action’, and the first time that you see all the stunt men just clash with one another, it was, well it was like a mosh pit. It was like electric. But again, like the beauty of that kind of mosh pit feeling was it felt safe. It felt like I never did I ever feel like I was going to, you know, get hurt or be in danger. It just felt — it felt amazing.
Toussaint: Testimony to the stunt guys. On my film, I shot this film after we done this. And we had a stunt guy. And he kept looking at me funny. And then he said to me, ‘Do you not recognise me?’ And I said, ‘No’, but he said, ‘You cut my balls off in House of the Dragon.’ And I was like, ‘Did I?’ And I was like, ‘Hang on, what were my moves? Oh, you were the guy on the end of —’ And he said ‘Yeah!’
Salim: Actually the other thing, right? This was one of those sequences as well where, I think, every stunt man and woman knew about this and wanted to be a part of this. So you had people who had done the Marvel stunts, James Bond, everyone literally in this sequence. So it was just mad.
Season three of House of the Dragon arrives on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, June 21 at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT.
Photo credit: Maggie Boyd, ATX TV Festival/HBO