House of the Dragon fans know there’s always plenty of uncomfortable drama filling the halls of the Red Keep. But season three’s nexus of cringe shifted far from King’s Landing in this week’s “The Dragon in Winter,” when the Targaryen urge for inbreeding took a particularly uneasy turn.
If you’ve read this far, you probably already know, but this week’s episode featured a love scene between Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) and his mother, Alicent (Olivia Cooke)—a scenario made more believable by the fact that Aemond gave his mother a lingering kiss on the lips when he departed for Harrenhal earlier in the season.
House of the Dragon lets the intimacy play out long enough to make viewers fall for the ruse—after we all saw how repulsed Alicent was by that kiss in the season premiere. But it turned out to be Aemond hallucinating his incestuous desire, which, despite the traditions of the Targaryen family, is still outrageously icky. Instead, he realized he was really in bed with his witchy lover, Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin).
Alys has a lot of mysterious knowledge, but even she was shocked by his reaction, and she’s none too pleased when the real Alicent shows up at Harrenhal moments later in “The Dragon in Winter.” In an interview with Variety, Rankin talked about the bizarre love triangle of sorts that springs up when Alicent, who’s there with the secret intention of killing her son, suddenly enters the scene.
The sex scene is agony. But the dinner scene, on a show that loves its tense dinner scenes, is also one to remember. “I think Alys is in her element but also kind of terrified at the same time,” Rankin said of that sequence. “But I think she feels like the stakes are very high, and I think Alys thrives in that. I think she intentionally wants it to feel unbearable. You know, because she wants [Alicent] to go.”
Alys comes from George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, but Rankin has some of her own ideas about the character that help fill in the blanks. For one thing, Rankin thinks she’s much older than she appears—older than even Aemond’s preferred motherly age range. That would explain how she knows so much about Harrenhal’s hidden stash of dragon eggs.
“I think she’s like 400 years old. I mean, give or take. I think we’re gonna like find out more soon, but she could be 400 years old. Like, I believe her, that’s the thing. I think there’s a lot of skepticism about, is she telling the truth? Is she manipulating? I’m like, believe the woman,” Rankin said.
House of the Dragon, like all Game of Thrones shows, has a tendency to kill off characters suddenly. But Rankin feels like Alys still has some runway left.
“I don’t feel like she’s in immediate danger of dying. I think she’s in immediate danger always, and maybe in immediate danger of something more emotionally profound happening, but not of dying. I think we have more time,” she said.
Says an actor on a show that guards its spoilers like dragon eggs—so take that with a grain of salt, in other words. House of the Dragon season three wraps up Sunday on HBO.
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