{"id":734397,"date":"2026-08-11T09:24:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T09:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/734397\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T09:24:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T09:24:13","slug":"house-of-the-dragon-star-says-theyre-honoured-to-be-killed-off-in-season-3-episode-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/734397\/","title":{"rendered":"House of the Dragon star says they\u2019re \u2018honoured\u2019 to be killed off in season 3 episode 8"},"content":{"rendered":"

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It\u2019s usually tough for actors to receive a call telling them their character is to be killed off a TV series \u2013 but not for one House of the Dragon<\/a> star, who was killed off in the latest episode.<\/p>\n

The season three finale of HBO<\/a>\u2019s Game of Thrones<\/a> prequel aired on Sunday (9 August), and it firmed up the playing pieces for what\u2019s sure to be a dramatic final season.<\/p>\n

One such event was the death of Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban), who, having been imprisoned by Rhaenyra (Emma D\u2019Arcy), jumped out of a window and got impaled by spikes. For Saban, getting the call informing her of her character\u2019s fate didn\u2019t leave her feeling sad, but honoured.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did get such a call \u2013 I sort of saw it coming, really,\u201d Saban told Entertainment Weekly.<\/a> <\/p>\n

Saban also said she knew her days were numbered as she had exceeded the life of her character in the books, who died much earlier in the timeline. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think I was having less formal conversations with the people who make the show and was being like, \u2018Come on, I know when I\u2019m gonna die,\u2019\u2019 she added. <\/p>\n

But this didn\u2019t stop showrunner Ryan Condal from giving her \u201cthe official call\u201d, which she found \u201cquite exhilarating and exciting, really, because you know that you\u2019re building towards something\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"HelaenaHelaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) didn\u2019t make it out of the \u2018House of the Dragon\u2019 finale alive (HBO)<\/p>\n

Addressing the brutal nature of the Game of Thrones world, she said: \u201cI feel quite honored to die on TV in this universe. So it\u2019s a bit of a bucket list.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, House of the Dragon director Nina Lopez-Corrado \u201ccontroversially\u201d defended the show<\/a> as the series continued to deviate from George RR Martin<\/a>\u2019s source material.<\/p>\n

Martin has distanced himself from the show, which began in 2022, detailing his issues<\/a> with Condal over several amendments.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do deviate just a little bit in episode seven from what\u2019s originally in the books and, personally, from a character standpoint, what Ryan [Condal, showrunner] and the writers did in terms of that really helped evolve the character storylines from what were in the books,\u201d she told Entertainment Weekly<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201dI know that\u2019s a very controversial thing to say for diehards, but I think some of the storylines that you\u2019re gonna see in [episode] seven that\u2019ll carry on into eight were really executed strongly by the writers and also by the actors.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Game of Thrones author, who has a co-creator and executive producer credit on the show, said he had a \u201cpretty wretched year\u201d and wasn\u2019t looking forward to writing \u201cabout everything that\u2019s gone wrong with House of the Dragon\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"GeorgeGeorge RR Martin has distanced himself from \u2018House of the Dragon\u2019 (Getty)<\/p>\n

Condal has addressed the \u201cdisappointing\u201d criticism, explaining that the source material was not a straightforward narrative and required a looser interpretation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was disappointing,\u201d Condal told Entertainment Weekly of Martin\u2019s comments. \u201cI will simply say I\u2019ve been a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire<\/a> for almost 25 years now, and working on the show has been truly one of the great privileges of, not only my career as a writer, but my life as a fan of science-fiction and fantasy.<\/p>\n

\u201cGeorge himself is a monument, a literary icon in addition to a personal hero of mine, and was heavily influential on me coming up as a writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s this incomplete history and it requires a lot of joining of the dots and a lot of invention as you go along the way,\u201d Condal said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will simply say, I made every effort to include George in the adaptation process. I really did. Over years and years. And we really enjoyed a mutually fruitful, I thought, really strong collaboration for a long time.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut at some point, as we got deeper down the road, he just became unwilling to acknowledge the practical issues at hand in a reasonable way. And I think as a showrunner, I have to keep my practical producer hat on and my creative writer, lover-of-the-material hat on at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, I just have to keep marching not only the writing process forward, but also the practical parts of the process forward for the sake of the crew, the cast, and for HBO, because that\u2019s my job,\u201d he continued.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I can only hope that George and I can rediscover that harmony someday. But that\u2019s what I have to say about it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":734398,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-734397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734397\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/734398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}