House of the Dragon is approaching its endgame.
The HBO fantasy drama, which returns for its third season on June 21, is moving towards its planned fourth-season conclusion. That gives the series two seasons to finish adapting the Dance of the Dragons, the Targaryen civil war at the centre of George RR Martin’s Fire & Blood.
But adapting Fire & Blood has never been straightforward. Unlike Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, the book is written as a fictional history – a chronicle assembled from competing accounts, court gossip, political record and the biases of those who claim to know what happened.
That has always given House of the Dragon unusual space to manoeuvre. The series is not simply transferring scenes from page to screen. It is turning a deliberately fragmented historical account into character drama, filling in the feelings and motivations of characters often described from the outside.
But how much will it change the record? That remains an open question. And for Emma D’Arcy, that question has become central to playing Rhaenyra Targaryen.
"The lovely tension about creating an adaptation like this is that the source material is a plotted history, and here we’re telling a story kind of through the point of view of a family and family drama," D’Arcy tells The National.
D’Arcy has spent five years with Rhaenyra, playing her first as a young heir and then as a queen whose claim has divided Westeros. As the series moves deeper into the war, the actor says they feel a responsibility for where the character goes next.
“I consider my job to be head of department for Rhaenyra,” D’Arcy says.
Fans have long speculated about how far the series may depart from the book as it moves towards its ending. Some have argued that, in the later stretch of Fire & Blood, Rhaenyra is often pushed to the margins of her own war, with much of the campaign carried by those fighting in her name.
D’Arcy says that discussions with showrunner Ryan Condal pointed to a more active path forward, with Rhaenyra’s pain becoming part of what pushes her further into power.
“I think, based on everything that we’ve built over two seasons, grief being a mechanism behind ambition feels very honest to me,” D’Arcy says.
“I think the conversations that Ryan and I had early were about seeing what happens when this relatively sympathetic character steps into the arena of ambition and really starts to play the game.”
That is a significant shift for a character who has spent much of the series internally tortured by her own position. Pushed out of power, Rhaenyra has been undermined by almost every part of the realm around her and has struggled with how to respond, especially when she still has love for some on the other side of the conflict.
But in the world of Westeros, hand-wringing will get you nowhere.
“One has to be very strong in one’s conviction,” D’Arcy says. “There’s a nice journey that we see Rhaenyra go on over the course of the three seasons, where in the first two, she is kind of racked by doubt.
“She has a lot of self-doubt about her inheritance, about her claim, about her father’s intentions for her. And I think some of that has dropped away, for better or for worse, by season three.
“There is a self-actualisation part to that, as well as something a little more sinister.”
Too much confidence is a dangerous thing in Westeros. When characters become too certain in this world, they often use that certainty to justify terrible things.
“I actually think she feels that, for the first time, the pieces of her campaign are slotting together,” D’Arcy says. “There’s a sort of divine rightness to her positioning within the realm.”
That sense of rightness is more than political. D’Arcy says Rhaenyra is increasingly leaning on faith, and that she begins to see her claim as something close to destiny, sharpened by the prophecy her father once entrusted to her.
And when a person believes history and prophecy are on their side, doubt can start to look like weakness.
“I actually think it’s sort of one of the kind of really interesting questions that this season poses for Rhaenyra,” D’Arcy says.
“Increasingly she is leaning on her faith. There is a kind of growing fervour to her religiosity, and I think she considers hers a holy war. While there is undeniably value to be found there, I think the concern is that it diminishes the work of doubt.”
That may make her a more active character – if, perhaps, a less likeable one.
"This season, I'm excited to see how far we can test the audience's loyalty to Rhaenyra," D'arcy recently told Flaunt Magazine.
As House of the Dragon moves towards its conclusion, the central question for Rhaenyra is not whether she will win the throne. It is what believing she is destined for that will make her willing to do.
House of the Dragon season three premieres June 21 on OSN+ in the Middle East
