It’s usually tough for actors to receive a call telling them their character is to be killed off a TV series – but not for one House of the Dragon star, who was killed off in the latest episode.
The season three finale of HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel aired on Sunday (9 August), and it firmed up the playing pieces for what’s sure to be a dramatic final season.
One such event was the death of Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban), who, having been imprisoned by Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), jumped out of a window and got impaled by spikes. For Saban, getting the call informing her of her character’s fate didn’t leave her feeling sad, but honoured.
“I did get such a call – I sort of saw it coming, really,” Saban told Entertainment Weekly.
Saban also said she knew her days were numbered as she had exceeded the life of her character in the books, who died much earlier in the timeline.
“I think I was having less formal conversations with the people who make the show and was being like, ‘Come on, I know when I’m gonna die,’’ she added.
But this didn’t stop showrunner Ryan Condal from giving her “the official call”, which she found “quite exhilarating and exciting, really, because you know that you’re building towards something”.
Addressing the brutal nature of the Game of Thrones world, she said: “I feel quite honored to die on TV in this universe. So it’s a bit of a bucket list.”
Earlier this month, House of the Dragon director Nina Lopez-Corrado “controversially” defended the show as the series continued to deviate from George RR Martin’s source material.
Martin has distanced himself from the show, which began in 2022, detailing his issues with Condal over several amendments.
“We do deviate just a little bit in episode seven from what’s originally in the books and, personally, from a character standpoint, what Ryan [Condal, showrunner] and the writers did in terms of that really helped evolve the character storylines from what were in the books,” she told Entertainment Weekly.
”I know that’s a very controversial thing to say for diehards, but I think some of the storylines that you’re gonna see in [episode] seven that’ll carry on into eight were really executed strongly by the writers and also by the actors.”
The Game of Thrones author, who has a co-creator and executive producer credit on the show, said he had a “pretty wretched year” and wasn’t looking forward to writing “about everything that’s gone wrong with House of the Dragon”.
Condal has addressed the “disappointing” criticism, explaining that the source material was not a straightforward narrative and required a looser interpretation.
“It was disappointing,” Condal told Entertainment Weekly of Martin’s comments. “I will simply say I’ve been a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of, not only my career as a writer, but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy.
“George himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer.”
“It’s this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way,” Condal said.
“I will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time.
“But at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time.”
“At the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that’s my job,” he continued.
“So I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that’s what I have to say about it.”