House of the Dragon’s Phia Saban on Playing Helaena’s Worst-Case Scenario

“She’s still very much in the beginning of processing her own grief, and suddenly she’s just an object for the people’s grief to be projected onto.” Photo: Ollie Upton/HBO

Spoilers for House of the Dragon season two, episode two below.

While most of the Targaryens and their allies in King’s Landing are scheming and looking for something to give them an edge against their rivals for the Iron Throne, there’s one member of Team Green to whom the Small Council isn’t turning for insights. Helaena Targaryen, the sister and wife of King Aegon Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney) and mother to his heir, is consistently overlooked on House of the Dragon, in part thanks to her somewhat odd nature. In the season-two premiere, Aegon calls her an “enduring mystery” with a dismissive, slightly bemused sense of exasperation. But Phia Saban, who plays Helaena, says the queen is much more aware than her family gives her credit for.

“I go through all the scripts and track what other characters say about her,” Saban says. “As a sensitive person, that would be something she would pick up on. It’s like how people have conversations in front of children they maybe wouldn’t want them to hear. You can be the most perceptive when you’re not given your due because everyone is going on around you as though you’re not relevant.”

Had anybody taken heed of Helaena’s ominous fear of “rats” in the premiere, they might have avoided tragedy. The episode ends with a hired thug and a ratcatcher brutally murdering one of Helaena’s young children right in front of her, a horrific incident actually toned down from how upsetting it is in George R. R. Martin’s books. As the latest victim of a war that seems destined to only claim more lives, Helaena’s response to the trauma puts her in the center for once, if only briefly: In episode two, she’s forced to grieve at her son’s public funeral in an attempt to win the Greens political points over the baby-killing Blacks. As Saban sees it, though, Helaena is a much less passive character than she might appear.

Is Helaena insane, or is she magical?
My take is that she’s an extremely sensitive person and hasn’t been nurtured by her family dynamic. I see her magic as an extremely intense form of intuition. That intuition is very real, but the general rumble of anxiety in her life and this feeling of not being heard or understood clouds the precision of her intuition. Because it’s never been validated, it seems more vague and people take it as madness.

Helaena is a different character in the show than in the book; here, she’s spacey and seems to have the gift of prophecy. Can you speak to that change?
I think it came from the fact that there’s this Targaryen history of dreamers. In season one, it’s alluded that Viserys feels he has this gift himself. He has his own special interests, like his model of Valyria. There was a really great opportunity for that to be present in his children, an amazing Cassandra-like aspect. Helaena is the one who is taken the least seriously, so the wisdom is hiding in plain sight.

The moment that ends the season premiere — the “Blood and Cheese” incident from the books — goes down differently in the text, where the assassins give Helaena a Sophie’s choice, only to murder the child she doesn’t choose. Were you aware of this storyline before you took the part? How do you think the change impacts the character?
I’d heard about that from other people. She’s in the worst possible situation you can imagine yourself in. It’s an incredibly intense emergency and she has her own coping mechanisms — in my idea of it, there’s a sort of dissociation. I think when she hears Cheese say “Do as I say or we’ll bleed both the babes,” she believes him. She has great integrity, and that’s not me saying that it doesn’t matter to her, but it matters more than anything else has mattered in her entire life and she needs to save one of her children. I find it interesting, story-wise: Having to deal with the fact that she told the truth is really, really heartbreaking.

How affected is Helaena by this? Her odd nature and shell-shocked reaction could give the impression that she’s relatively numb to it, especially compared to Rhaenyra’s grief over Luke’s death, but that can’t be the case, right?
Hopefully, people watch the episode and will have strong feelings about it. I’m more interested in that than telling people how she feels about it. That was my take on it, and it fits into this amazing story that has these themes — Rhyanerya’s grief, Alicent’s grief of not having been there, the grief of the heir — all of those themes are in conversation with one another. But when you’re playing a character, you’re trying to be true to how they react. I’m happy to leave that to the audience. What does Helaena feel about it?

In the second episode, Helaena is forced to go out in public with her son’s morbid funeral procession as a propaganda move against her wishes. I can’t imagine this helped her mental state.
I think it’s the worst possible thing she could have gone through while reeling from what happened the night before. She finds it completely overstimulating. She’s still very much in the beginning of processing her own grief and suddenly she has to be the figurehead for the grief of the nation, and she has to do it right and she has to do it appropriately. She’s just an object for the people’s grief to be projected onto. For someone so sensitive, all of that noise is incredibly overwhelming. It’s a tragedy that she had to do the funeral.

What is her relationship with her family now? She doesn’t appear to be close with her brother-husband. Where does she fit into this Targayen family other than as a pawn?
I was paired with Ewan Mitchell and Tom Glynn-Carney and Olivia Cooke for a few press interviews recently, and it was so interesting hearing those actors express their feelings about their characters’ place in the family dynamic. The show really successfully puts light on the dynamic that can be present within families, where each individual feels that they have been done hard the most. There’s this victim thing with siblings sometimes: You don’t understand. I had it the worst. They are the only people who could possibly understand each other, and yet they are completely incapable of it. They chronically miss each other. Especially her relationship with Aegon. I don’t have the experience of having a child, but on the show, they’re the only two people who have that relationship with their child in common. They’re the two people who could make each other feel better, and they can’t. In an ideal world, I’d like to think there is some coming together over this shared grief, but I think they’re all too wrapped up in the blame they have themselves.

Can you talk about her relationship with Alicent? After this tragedy, she goes running to her mother and seems to not notice or care that she’s sleeping with Criston Cole. She’s close with her, and yet there’s still this distance. 
In that scene, the stakes are too high for that to be an insight into their relationship. But in the scope of the show, I really enjoyed getting more time to explore the dynamic between Helaena and Alicent this season. They have a great unity and sameness: They both have been expected to sacrifice a lot for the royal family. They hold up a mirror to each other, and because the propensity for connection and closeness is so high, you can sometimes be more disacquainted and more let down by your mother than anyone else because you expect oneness with them. I really see that with Helaena and Alicent and the fact that they’re basically growing up at the same time.

Helaena is described as an innocent by Rhaenyra, which is something extremely rare in Westeros and especially among Targaryens. Is that how you see her?
No one believes that they are an innocent. We all have so much baggage and we are more acutely aware of our own flaws than anyone is of ours. From an active perspective, it’s interesting that that is what’s projected onto her, but I don’t think that’s her experience of herself. She would have a long list of flaws; her insecurities or the ways she feels let down by herself.

Is Helaena rooting for Team Green, or does she just want to keep her family safe? 
It’s probably more the latter. She doesn’t talk politics, she doesn’t think politics. Things are much more immediate for her. But, of course, she’s deeply affected by them. It’s not that she doesn’t have her own thoughts and opinions, as you will see this season. But I don’t think she’s wearing a Team Green T-shirt.

On that note, can you attempt to step outside the role you play and give an unbiased answer: Who would you support, Team Green or Team Black?
I’m too close. I spend so much more time with Team Green that I’ve probably drunk the Kool-Aid. I couldn’t possibly be more biased.