House of the Dragon creator explains the major change to House Velaryon
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The Targaryen clan isn't the only famous family of Westeros we'll be meeting in HBO's Game of Thrones prequel series.
House of the Dragon will introduce House Velaryon, a storied medieval family just as ancient as the silver-haired dragonriders. The books described them generally as having pale skin, silver hair, and purple eyes, but Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, the two showrunners of the new series, tweaked their origins in order to include more people of color among the cast.
"The world is very different now than it was 10 years ago when [Game of Thrones] all started. It's different than 20 years ago when Peter Jackson made The Lord of the Rings. These types of stories need to be more inclusive than they traditionally have been," Condal tells EW on the set of House of the Dragon in December. "It was very important for Miguel and I to create a show that was not another bunch of white people on the screen, just to put it very bluntly."
Nadav Kander for EW Meet House Velaryon: Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) and his wife Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best).
Condal says it was an iterative process that led to the decision to make House Velaryon a House of noble Black seafarers, the wealthiest family in Westeros apart from the crown. It began with Game of Thrones creator and author George R.R. Martin. Martin hired Condal to develop House of the Dragon. Though, the assignment, Condal says, was always anchored in the period of history involving the Dance of the Dragons, a civil war that broke out amongst the Targaryens over succession. House Velaryon maintain prominent roles in the sequence of events.
The Velaryons, like those of House Targaryen, have the blood of Old Valyria in their veins. Though they don't generally care to mount dragons, they command the oceans on ships. It was their fleet that helped Aegon "The Conqueror" Targaryen take over Westeros years earlier. Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), nicknamed the Sea Snake after his favored ship, is the most famous of them, having traveled farther than any in Westeros.
According to Condal, Martin had once toyed with the idea of making the Velaryons a House of Black nobles in his books.
Ollie Upton/HBO Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) and Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) consult by the fire.
"Long, long ago when he was conceiving of this world, [Martin] himself had considered the idea of making Velaryons a race of Black people with silver hair that essentially came from the other side of the ocean and conquered Westeros," he says. "That's a fascinating idea and that always really stuck with me because it's such a stark image. I just thought, 'Well, why couldn't we do a version of that now?'"
Both Condal and Sapochnik felt strongly about featuring a person of color in a powerful position of nobility in the context of the story. In House of the Dragon, that would be Lord Corlys. Condal explains they "didn't want to do it in a way that felt like it was an afterthought or, worse, tokenism." They also wanted to avoid the recurring image of people of color showing up in fantasy sagas as pirates, slaves, and mercenaries.
"It's not any of that at all," Condal says. "I've seen people that look like myself on screen in these types of high-fantasy stories since I was born because I'm a white guy. What's it like for everybody else? ... We went back and just looked at the story and said, 'How do we do this in a way that can feel like it's done integrally with the story?'"
Nadav Kander for EW Steve Toussaint stars as Lord Corlys Velaryon, the famed seafaring explorer known as the Sea Snake, in 'House of the Dragon.'
Condal is proud of the work he and Sapochnik did with Lord Corlys, whom he likens in a surface-level sense to Charles Dance's Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones. "He's the second richest, second most powerful guy but for the person on the throne," Condal remarks. "Everybody wants to marry his kids, everybody wants to be in league with him, everybody wants him sitting at their dinner table."
The change to House Velaryon also enhanced another element of the story. The drama in House of the Dragon stems from the succession of the Iron Throne, which brings up a lot of questions of legitimacy. (Who is whose bastard and who is a legitimate heir?) "It makes that storytelling even richer in a way," Condal says. "Once we had that idea, it just felt like everything fell into place and it was the right way to go."
House of the Dragon premieres Aug. 21 on HBO.
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