HBO‘s House of the Dragon Season 1 introduced Game of Thrones fans to even more of the complex, messy, and incestuous relationships of the Targaryen family tree. There was, however, one royal couple who defied all the rules and soon became fan favorites. Princess Rhaenys “The Queen Who Never Was” Targaryen (Eve Best) and Lord Corlys “The Sea Snake” Velaryon (Steve Toussaint) charmed House of the Dragon viewers with their mature, loving, and not incestuous romance. Their chemistry was sly and sexy, their relationship a true partnership built on love. That Corlys was a self-made adventurer seemed to suit the clever and confident Rhaenys. That Rhaenys was passed over for the Iron Throne because of her gender seemed to rankle Corlys to no end — not because it denied him the fulfillment of his own huge ambitions, but because he truly felt she not only deserved the post, but was also the most suited to protecting the realm.
Okay, so that’s why fans are so intoxicated with Corlys Velaryon and Rhaenys Targaryen’s union, but how did it happen in the first place? In the world of House of the Dragon, Targaryens usually don’t marry for love. Their marriages are brokered either as political pacts or to ensure the purity of their magical Valyrian bloodline. Sure, Corlys Velaryon eventually became the richest man in the realm and was of Valyrian descent, but wouldn’t Rhaenys’s parents have wanted to pair her off with a brother, cousin, or uncle? How did this love match happen?
During a recent in-person roundtable conversation with House of the Dragon stars Steve Toussaint and Eve Best, Decider asked them if they’d ever imagined Corlys and Rhaenys’s “meet cute,” and they immediately got to work setting the scene at a lavish party seemingly held at the home of her parents, Prince Aemon Targaryen and his wife Lady Jocelyn Baratheon…
“I think they were at a big ball. They were at a massive ball at Rhaenys’s family estate and up rocked this dude,” Best said dramatically, prompting everyone to laugh in glee, “just come off his latest adventure wherever he was in the ‘Caribbean.’ His hair was all wild.“
Steve Toussaint grinned and kept nodding “yes” at each new detail Best offered.
“And I think she was being sort of married off, you know? Her parents were trying to present her to be married. And she’s very high up in [society],” Best said. “And then in comes this kind of rock star, who’s a sort of total beach bum compared to—”
Toussaint put on a laid back surfer accent to wave and say, “Hey, dudes!”
“I think they were at a big ball. They were at a massive ball at Rhaenys’s family estate and up rocked this dude.”
Eve Best
“He’s worked his way up from nothing,” Best said. “He’s a real [man] and I feel like all the other people that were being presented to Rhaenys were these kind of uptight, rather kind of hopeless, flaky, sort of niminy-piminy, rich, rich boys. Entitled. Kind of Aristos. And then—”
“Then he comes in,” Toussaint said.
“And there’s no contest,” Best said.
“Yes, that’s true. Because I feel like he went there with his brother or his friend and he sort of went, ‘Oh, her. I want her.” Toussaint’s tone emphasizing how Coryls was immediately set on Rhaenys. “And his friend or brother was like, ‘No, she’s out of your class! You don’t have a chance.’ And he was like, ‘I don’t care. I’m gonna try.’”
Best then took over the narrative, imagining Corlys coming directly to Rhaenys on the dance floor and causing quite the scene with their immediate connection.
“And after that, history!” Toussaint said.
“And then they do riotous love-making in the woods,” Best finished, placing the story in some sort of happy medium of Westeros and Bridgerton.
That might be the dazzling way Corlys and Rhaenys’s romance began, but Toussaint warned the roundtable of journalists that there might be issues in the couple’s decades-old marriage in House of the Dragon Season 2.
“There are…small cracks appearing. All is not well in paradise, but I don’t think all is lost,” Toussaint said in response to a question posed by Screen Rant’s Deven McClure. “It can be fixed. If, particularly, Corlys is prepared to do the work, which means normally, what he does is, ‘Oh my God, it’s getting too emotional. I’m going to go on my boat now. See you in six years because then they’ll have forgotten what it was.’”
“But he can’t when we meet him [in Season 2]. This time he’s injured. His boat is in state of repair, so he is forced to stay in the room and have a conversation.”
As for what that conversation entails? Fans will have to patiently wait for House of the Dragon Season 2 to premiere on HBO and Max on June 16 at 9 PM ET to find out.
At least we’ll always have that ball now…and the “riotous love-making in the woods.”
