Consider yourselves warned.
That’s the message House of the Dragon star Steve Toussaint has for his legion of Aussie fans, ahead of the show’s highly anticipated season three premiere.
“If you have loins, gird them,” he tells New Idea.
It’s a fitting warning. Steve plays Lord Corlys Velaryon, the “Sea Snake” – Lord of the Tides, Master of Driftmark, head of the royal fleet and, for a time, the richest man in Westeros. But three seasons in, the crown has gotten a whole lot heavier, with Corlys losing his wife, his children and a fair bit of his certainty along the way.
Ahead of season three, New Idea caught up with the 61-year-old to talk grief, gore, sea legs and why – sorry, Targaryens – House Velaryon will always come out on top.
He’s gone from “the most powerful lord in Westeros” to a man with almost nothing left
Corlys started the series as one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the Seven Kingdoms. Three seasons later, he’s lost his wife, his children and a fair bit of his certainty along with them. So what’s it been like playing that slow unravelling?
“When we first met him in the small council, he was angry and wanted this done and wanted that done, but then you get to see a softer side of him with his wife and then of course when he loses her, the effect that that has on him,” Steve says. “How important she was to him.”
He reveals that early on, he and his on-screen wife, Eve Best, went straight to the showrunners with a very important question: was the Corlys-Rhaenys marriage political, or was it love?
“They were very adamant that ‘these two actually love each other’ and they are one of the few couples on the show who actually really like to be around each other,” he says. “So that made her loss that much more impactful on him.”
The Battle of the Gullet was “complete mayhem” to film
One of the most anticipated sequences of the entire series, Steve has previously described the Battle of the Gullet as total chaos – severed heads, blood everywhere, water cannons blasting. So what was it actually like being in the thick of it?
“It was great, it was fun,” he says. “It was incredibly well planned, but for us, it felt like chaos.”
He explains that weeks of fight choreography rehearsed in a roomy gym in a tracksuit look very different once you’re actually on set.
“When you move onto the set, and it’s smaller, more narrow, and there’s lots of water and blood everywhere, lots of corpses everywhere, then you have to adapt the choreography to that,” he says.
For Toussaint, that meant tracking his character’s emotional journey moment by moment – first just trying to survive, then facing off against his nemesis, Lohar.
“There comes a point where your emotional journey as a character is ‘I just need to survive this,’ and then that later changes to, when I’m face to face with Lohar, ‘I need to kill her,'” he says. “Each thing is a series of little moments because what you want, hopefully, with a fight scene, is that the audience understands where you are emotionally.”
Three seasons as a seafaring lord – but has he picked up any actual sailing skills?
Short answer: no. But the good news is, he’s apparently cured his seasickness.
“Ever since I announced that I got seasick, which was such a silly thing to say, I’ve been on several boats since, and I’m like, ‘oh, I’m fine, that’s weird,'” he laughs.
Even the giant gimbal-rigged ship models used to film the Battle of the Gullet couldn’t shake him.
“Everyone was like ‘are you going to be okay’ and I was like ‘no I’m fine’ – and I was,” he says. “But have I learned anything? No.”
According to Corlys himself, House Velaryon beats House Targaryen, hands down
We asked Steve to finish the sentence: “House Velaryon is better than House Targaryen because…”
“We have more healthy relationships, I think that’s the main thing,” he says. “And also, we don’t rely on big, massive beasts for our power. Everything that we did, we did ourselves. I think we are a much more grounded and much more self-reliant house than Targaryen.”
And then, naturally, a dig at the in-laws.
“My god, it’s an uncle and his niece, c’mon, really. And Aegon marries his sister!”
If he could swap roles for an episode, he knows exactly who he’d pick
Two names come to mind for the star: Daemon Targaryen and (pre-fiery-demise) Aegon.
“Daemon, because I just like the idea of a character that doesn’t really care,” he says. “He’s a loose cannon and can do what he wants. And I like his armour too, it’s very sexy.”
As for Aegon, it’s all down to how Tom Glynn-Carney plays him.
“He manages to find the humour in it that when you’re reading it, you don’t see it,” Steve says. “But watching Tom playing him with that humour, I think ‘God, that must be fun to do.'”
New episodes of House of the Dragon air every Monday on HBO Max.
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