House Of The Dragon‘s Ryan Corr talks the unexpected longevity of Pedro Pascal’s Red Viper
The actor, who plays the recently deceased Ser Harwin "Breakbones" Strong, says Ryan Condal saw Strong and Red Viper as having a similar "impact"
Aux News Corr
Spoiler warning: This article contains details about key plot points and developments in House Of The Dragon episode six.
Even fabricated history repeats itself. HBO’s House Of The Dragon, which travels back roughly 200 years before the events of Game Of Thrones, has proven so far that unexpected, brutal deaths have always been Westeros’ bread and butter. Both series’ penchant for killing off anyone and everyone has led to jokes about job security for the series’ actors. But for the actors who play murdered characters, like Ryan Corr, it’s nice to have a well-populated graveyard from which to take inspiration.
Corr plays Ser Harwin “Breakbones” Strong on House Of The Dragon, who (alongside his father) faced death by all-too-literal fire and brimstone in the series’ most recent episode. Speaking with The A.V. Club’s Cindy White in a new interview, Corr reveals that House Of The Dragon creator Ryan Condal actually directly drew the connection between Strong and Pedro Pascal’s unforgettably-offed Red Viper of Dorne (also known as Oberyn Martell.)
Corr says Condal emphasized “how [the Viper] was there for a limited amount of time but his presence lingered, long after his death and throughout.” “Obviously they’re very different characters, but [Condal and co-creator Miguel Sapochnik] saw their impact as being similar,” Corr shares.
For Corr’s onscreen father Gavin Spokes (who plays the also-deceased Ser Lyonel Strong), a different character of the beheaded persuasion comes to mind: the former King of the North.
“The good die young,” Spokes muses. “I mean, Lyonel was not very young, but yes, exactly. We keep up that tradition Ned Stark so beautifully launched for us all.”
“You’d be very wary of falling in love with characters on [Game Of Thrones] because they were all killed,” Corr agrees. “But that was sort of one of the ideas, too. We spoke to Miguel [Sapochnik] and he said, ‘We want to rip their heart out.’”
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Hmm. I don’t see it. Like, we got almost a whole season to spend with Oberyn, and he gets that big fight with the Mountain at the end. This guy, I don’t even think I realized he was a character until the episode he died in.
The show removed his one notable fight from the book, in which Criston Cole broke his collarbone. There are some people who even try to argue that Rhaenyra’s first kid wasn’t fathered by him because of that injury.
His character is the first one I think of when I think about characters getting too quickly glossed over because of the speed at which the show moves. Think of how devastating his death would have been if we had been able to see some of his and Rhaenyra’s love story. At least seen how much they cared for each other, the support he gave her, how hard it was for him to stand in the background and watch his sons call another man father? I think the audience would have grown really attached to him and his death would have hit so hard. As it is, he got, like, three scenes. Missed opportunity.
I don’t remember this guy being a character in any of the earlier episodes. But that’s this show for you, just sort of lazily speed-reading the last series. LOTR was doing the same (if you liked Gandalf, here’s a wizard! etc.) but this newest episode finally made real progress towards something new.
He was the goldcloak who grabbed Rhaenyra when she was pretending to be a boy and stole the candy. I think he maybe had two line prior to the last episode.
so he was much much older than her than he appeared to be in this episode? fits with the series m.o.
Yeah, the selective aging/recasting is weird as hell. Especially if you contrast Viserys and Daemon. One of them hasn’t aged a day and the other looks, as I think the AV club review put it, “like Mr. Burns melted.”
Seriously?
This guy had, what, 3 minutes of screentime? And a terribly dull 3 minutes, at that.
You know, I know better than to check the AV Club before watching something I like, but putting this as your dek – The actor, who plays the recently deceased Ser Harwin “Breakbones” Strong, says Ryan Condal saw Strong and Red Viper as having a similar “impact”– and then a “spoiler alert” under the art, at the top of the article, is pretty obnoxious.