Westeros

HBO has announced a number of additional castings for House of the Dragon, which is set to begin filming this April. Deadline has a good report with details based on HBO’s official press release, but we’ll summarize here:

• Rhys Ifans as Otto Hightower, Hand of the King
• Steve Touissant as Corlys Velaryon, Lord of the Tides
• Eve Best as Rhaenys Targaryen
• Sonoya Mizuno as Mysaria

Very interesting casting news, with Rhys Ifans definitely being the best known name, and by sheer happenstance we very recently watched Steve Touissant as a supportive, sympathetic father in Russell T. Davies’s It’s a Sin (which is due out in the US on HBO Max on February 18th and which we highly recommend… but have the tissues handy, as its beautiful portrayal of a group of young gay men and their acquaintances in 80’s London is often heartrending; but we digress….)

Two things leap out. The obvious one is that Touissant does not look very much like Velaryon as described, as the Velaryons look very much like the Targaryens (to the point that a bastard of the family, Aurane Waters, looks somewhat similar to Prince Rhaegar) because of their similar Valyrian origin. But that it history from the novels and the world of Ice and Fire, and I don’t believe the Velaryons have ever been mentioned in HBO’s Game of Thrones. The less obvious one is that Touissant and Best (who plays his wife, “The Queen Who Never Was”) are very similar age, which is not the case of their characters in Fire and Blood. In Martin’s account in Fire and Blood, Corlys was 37 when he married the 16-year-old Rhaenys, after having spent much of his life pursuing exploration on the high seas.

We’ll have a further post up discussing details that executive Casey Bloys revealed at TCA, regarding both House of the Dragon and the recently-revealed efforts to bring both live and animated series to production using other parts of Martin’s work.