Emma D’Arcy’s model of Home of the Dragon protagonist Rhaenyra Targaryen is launched throughout the agonizing supply of her third youngster, her face contorting as she pushes and screams. To arrange, D’Arcy frolicked digging into historic materials about childbirth and its impact on ladies. However they stored coming again to a extra fashionable textual content: The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson’s memoir mashed with queer, feminist concept. “What I learn in that e-book within the context of the present was an individual who was making an attempt to provide you with an ideology of motherhood, as an individual who discovered heteronormative conference sophisticated or a nasty match,” D’Arcy explains over Zoom.
One doesn’t essentially count on to leap from George R.R. Martin to Maggie Nelson—however D’Arcy, who steps into the position held for 5 episodes by Milly Alcock, brings a completely distinctive perspective to the questions of gender during which the Recreation of Thrones prequel trades. The 30-year-old D’Arcy is a nonbinary individual utilizing they/them pronouns, enjoying a lady for whom energy is each inherited and elusive. Rhaenyra has been appointed inheritor to her father, the king (Paddy Considine), however her potential to guide is doubted.
To D’Arcy, the binaries current in medieval fantasy aren’t all that totally different from the world during which we now stay. “If she’s gender questioning in any means, it’s as a result of she sees males occupy an area that isn’t afforded to her. And he or she craves the house, which makes her replicate on why she is just not afforded the identical issues as, say, her uncle Daemon, to whom she feels extremely related and akin and kind of genetically acquainted,” D’Arcy says. “And but the principles are utilized utterly in another way to 2 of them. I believe, in all probability, I began in a really related place after I was youthful when it comes to craving the best to occupy house in a means that I noticed boys and males do.”
Home of the Dragon has been quietly doling out time jumps all through its record-breaking first 5 episodes—however the leap that opens the sixth is the most important but, taking Rhaenyra from newlywed to mom of three. And whereas D’Arcy’s look marks an thrilling flip for the present, they admit they fear viewers may have already grown connected to Alcock’s interpretation of Rhaenyra. “I believe now I’ve a bizarre guilt as a result of I’m conscious that so as to come into the present, Milly’s obtained to depart. And that that’s going to be a ache for lots of people, me included, frankly,” they are saying.
They hope, nonetheless, that the brutal means during which their Rhaenyra debuts will alleviate a number of the potential sorrow over Alcock’s departure. “We actually don’t give the viewers a lot time in any respect to sit down with their grief,” they are saying. Moments after giving start, a bleeding Rhaenyra marches by way of King’s Touchdown to current the child to her former finest buddy and now queen and stepmother Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who’s frightened about her personal line of succession.
D’Arcy and Alcock didn’t spend time coordinating their performances—they went for a drink outdoors the context of filming—however on seeing the primary episode of Home of the Dragon, D’Arcy was taken by how a lot they acknowledged Alcock’s Rhaenyra. “I’m feeling a bit like watching Targaryen residence video or one thing,” they are saying. D’Arcy and Cooke, nonetheless, did spend time throughout rehearsal studying scenes between their characters’ youthful selves that they might by no means movie, “simply to get a style and a taste of that extra hopeful, extra erotic, fizzier adolescent power, and to know what’s misplaced.” Sure, D’Arcy did say erotic. “I believe most of these early, intense, adolescent friendships have an erotic edge,” they clarify. “As a result of it’s an age the place we’re making an attempt to work out who we’re and what we would like and who we need to fuck. These are all intersecting questions.”
Rhaenyra’s sexual exercise is a focus of D’Arcy’s preliminary look, with King’s Touchdown all atwitter with the query of who fathered her kids—none of whom appear to bear resemblance to her husband, Laenor Velaryon. (Laenor is homosexual, and he and Rhaenyra seem to have labored out an settlement.) “I’m nonetheless undecided that she has but had the cognitive house to actually perceive her personal need,” D’Arcy says. “And, concurrently, I believe her intuition is for this extremely enmeshed attachment to folks, and he or she kind of locks on an excessive amount of and falls aside.”
When filming Home of the Dragon, D’Arcy, whose earlier work consists of the Simon Pegg and Nick Frost Prime Video comedy Fact Seekers, didn’t actually really feel the strain of strolling into a significant franchise. Due to COVID, the set was very personal. “After some time, it turns into a day job in a very beautiful means,” they are saying. Now that the press cycle for the collection is effectively underway, the magnitude of what they’re part of is hitting. Their first scene as Rhaenyra launches them into an already vibrant discourse about how the present paperwork the dangers of childbirth, beginning with Rhaenyra’s mom’s loss of life throughout a rudimentary C-section.
