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House of the Dragon star Phia Saban is weighing in on the significant changes made to her character, Helaena Targaryen, in the HBO adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood book.
In the season 3 finale, a pregnant Helaena, who was being held captive by Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen — played by Emma D’Arcy — died by suicide upon realizing she and her unborn child would likely never be freed but used as pawns in the battle for the Iron Throne.
In Martin’s Fire & Blood, Helaena is not pregnant when she throws herself from a window and impales herself on the spikes below. She is, instead, mourning the death of her third child, son Maelor, who is brutally killed in the ongoing Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. (Presumably, in the show, Helaena is pregnant with Maelor when she dies.)
“I think you can only play the story that you’re telling,” Saban said of the changes to Helaena in an interview with Variety on Sunday. “So really it’s the character that I built, and the story that [cocreator] Ryan [Condal] and [writer/producer] Sara [Hess] and all the writers were creating, that was really all that felt relevant.”
She continued, “But I know that there are differences in the stories, and I think that some of those differences are really cool. And I don’t think that Helaena would have been maybe such a juicy part for me personally to play if there weren’t some of the differences that have been made. So you kind of just roll with the punches.”
Helaena, the only daughter of Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) and King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine), was considered the most genteel and innocent of Alicent’s children, and her tragic death in Sunday’s season 3 finale comes as a gut-punch for viewers.
“It’s a tragedy,” Saban agreed in her interview with Variety. “That’s definitely the arc of Helaena’s story.”
“But I think, as she says earlier, ‘This is my body, and this is my baby — and both of those things have been forsaken as long as I’ve lived,’” the actress explained. “And she doesn’t want to live the way she’s living anymore, and she feels that she wants to protect the children that she does have. She’s just trying her best.”
During a press conference ahead of the season 3 finale, D’Arcy described Helaena as the “moral heart of the show,” whose death will undoubtedly lead to severe ramifications for Rhaenyra in the show’s fourth and final season.
“She’s maybe the only character who has a proximity to power but remains kind of uncontaminated. And so, I think her death condemns Rhaenyra to the path she’s chosen,” D’Arcy said, per Variety. “There’s no way back after that. There’s certainly no route back to a more moderate form of leadership. And, I mean, I don’t know where we go from here, but I imagine it’s likely to be impassable in her relationship with Alicent, which I think also means Helaena’s death condemns Rhaenyra to be alone in her pursuit for power.”
House of the Dragon season 3 is available to stream on HBO Max.
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