‘House of the Dragon’ Star Phia Saban on Helaena’s Finale ‘Tragedy’ and Changes to Maelor Storyline

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of “House of the Dragon,” now streaming on HBO Max.

HBO’s “House of the Dragon” lost its moral center with the death of Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) in Sunday’s Season 3 finale.

The pregnant Helaena takes her own life by jumping from her window in the Red Keep when left alone in her room. It’s a death many fans saw coming following a season of Helaena’s ominous visions and deep depression over being secluded from her young daughter, Jaehaera, in King’s Landing. Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) discovers Helaena’s suicide just before the episode ends.

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“It’s a tragedy. That’s definitely the arc of Helaena’s story,” Saban tells Variety. “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.’ 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.”

Before she died, Helaena left behind the final piece of a tapestry she’s been embroidering throughout all of “House of the Dragon” Season 3 for Rhaenyra to find. After the image of Rhaenyra jumping to her own death and landing on spikes, Rhaenyra sees a depiction of her on the Iron Throne with blood streaming down from the crown on her head and surrounded by dragon flames.

During a press conference, D’Arcy called Helaena the “moral heart of the show” and predicted how her death will affect Rhaenyra heading into “House of the Dragon”’s fourth and final season.

“She’s maybe the only character who has a proximity to power, but remains kind of uncontaminated,” D’Arcy says. “And so, I think her death, condemns Rhaenyra to the path she’s chosen. 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.”

While creator Ryan Condal has deviated on “House of the Dragon” from the source material in author George R.R. Martin’s “Fire & Blood,” Helaena’s arc has had some of the most significant changes, including the exclusion of her youngest child, Maelor. In Martin’s version, Helaena dies by suicide after Maelor — who survived the “Blood & Cheese” incident in Season 2 — is brutally murdered while she’s locked up in the tower. And she is not pregnant at the time of her death.

Saban says these book plot points didn’t affect her performance of the character on “House of the Dragon.”

“I think you can only play the story that you’re telling,” Saban says. “So really it’s the character that I built, and the story that Ryan and Sarah [Hess] and all the writers were creating, that was really all that felt relevant. 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 Helena 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.”

See below for more from Variety‘s interview with Saban about the “House of the Dragon” Season 3 finale.

I don’t know how much you follow stuff online, but Helaena has been a deeply beloved character, and even more so this season. I think people just want her to be with her chickens and her babies, so I know they are going to take this very hard, and it really mirrors what happens in the book “Fire & Blood,” because the smallfolk will take Helaena’s death so hard. How do you personally feel, knowing that this is all coming? Helaena’s death is really a turning point in this series.

It’s very nice to hear that, and that people care. I guess that’s really what you can hope for. That one way or another, people sort of care whether you live or die. So that’s very nice to hear.

During the finale conversation between Helaena and Rhaenyra, Helaena tells the story of a beetle she likes, and Rhaenyra’s like, “That’s great. You could show me sometime.” And Helaena says, “You don’t care. You’re pretending. You’re ugly.” Does she now dislike Rhaenyra more than she doesn’t like Aegon? What brought her to this point with Rhaenyra, and would she have previously chosen Rhaenyra as the “better” one?

Interesting. I don’t know about the comparison. I think the context is so different for both of them. It’s very hard to compare. The feeling from Rhaenyra is that she feels extremely violated. She feels her freedom’s been violated by her and her relationship to freedom and to nature and to all of the things that feed her as a person have been taken away. So I suppose it’s more than a punishment — I feel it’s more like a home truth. You’re looking for what’s useful to you, and there are things in the world that are fascinating and beautiful, despite how they relate to like power struggles in the kingdom. And I think she just is making a point about that. That there’s more to life. And actually, I think she’s proud that that’s how she feels.

Do you think Helaena reaches her breaking point because of Mysaria’s warning to her? If she hadn’t had that interaction with Mysaria, would she have kept going as she was?

I don’t think it wouldn’t have happened if Mysaria didn’t say it, but I do think it’s just another addition to the descent. There’s a confirmation of what Helaena already feels, which is that she is never going to live a life again in which she feels alive. And that’s kind of what Helaena says to Rhaenyra. She’s like, “There’s more to life than not just not being dead. Like, the bar is on the floor. I have higher dreams and hopes and feelings for the world than that.” In a sense, maybe some might say that she takes power from what she does. That she can, rather than being killed by a vision, she can choose that for herself.

We’ve gotten a lot of Helaena’s visions this season. Which one did you enjoy performing the most? What did you think was the most powerful?

I love all of them. I can’t say that I didn’t love being on the dragon. That’s like a bucket list thing. We’re on the dragon show — I had to get in there. So I’m very grateful that was written for me. And I loved it. It was so fun.

Helaena chose to stop working on her tapestry and leave it behind where Rhaenyra will presumably find it. It looks like Rhaenyra is bleeding from the crown in that final embroidery — is that what you think that is?

I think Helaena’s embroideries blend a sort of dreamlike and literal. It’s an art form, so I don’t think she’s subscribing to necessarily always realism. But yes, it didn’t look like a great portent, did it? Wish her all the best, though!

For more of Variety’s “House of the Dragon” finale coverage, read this recap and story about the press conference with co-creator Ryan Condal and star Emma D’Arcy and this interview with James Norton, who plays Ormund Hightower. This interview has been edited and condensed.