The Big Picture

Welcome to a new episode of Collider Ladies Night with
House of the Dragon
star Eve Best.
During her chat with Perri Nemiroff, Best celebrates one of her greatest acting inspirations and discusses lessons learned from performing at The Globe Theatre.
While digging into
House of the Dragon
, she explains why she thinks Rhaenys would have made an especially good leader and reveals the Season 2 scene she’s most proud of.

Eve Best is an acting ace. She’s got loads of impressive screen credits to her name and is a theater legend with two Tony Award nominations, a Drama Desk Award win and a Laurence Olivier Award win as well. Now she’s an absolute force on HBO’s House of the Dragon. It probably goes without saying, she’s always been a dream guest for Collider Ladies Night, but a recent Ladies Night guest skyrocketed Best to being a top priority. While chatting with Jessica Gunning for Baby Reindeer, a performance that appears to have put her on the path to snagging an Emmy nomination, Gunning pinpointed an actor who made a major impression on her during the early days of her career. That actor? Eve Best. Soon after chatting with Gunning, interview opportunities for House of the Dragon Season 2 popped up, and I jumped on it.

Best plays Rhaenys, the Queen Who Never Was, in the Game of Thrones prequel series. Despite having a number of qualities that’d make her an ideal leader, Rhaenys was passed over to succeed King Jaehaerys I for being a woman. She eventually comes to terms with the decision and attempts to serve Westeros valiantly as a dragon rider and as the wife of Lord Corlys Velaryon of Driftmark (Steve Toussaint). Despite Viserys (Paddy Considine) naming Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) his heir, Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) takes the throne, solidifying the stark divide between the Greens, those who support Aegon, and the Blacks, those who continue to back Rhaenyra’s claim. As a member of Team Black, Rhaenys begins Season 2 doing what she can to keep her side safe while strategizing for all-out war.

With House of the Dragon Season 2 kicking off its highly anticipated run on Sunday, June 16, I recently sat down with Best for a Ladies Night conversation to discuss how she’s honed her craft over the years, and Rhaenys’ approach to being a strong leader with war brewing in Westeros.

The ‘Grease’ Actor Who Floored Best

While Gunning looks to Best for inspiration, Best offered up a very clear memory of finding a source of inspiration herself. Someone who redefined feminine power and beauty on the big screen, Stockard Channing.

“When I was a young there was a performance that
really
struck me. I was seven years old when I saw
Grease
for the first time and Stockard Channing as Rizzo, which I think is just kind of an era-defining performance, which I actually watched the other day again. I haven’t watched
Grease
for years and years. It is extraordinary what she does and the doors that she opened with that performance in who she was and the way that she was, and because I identified with her so much. She was this spunky woman who was a rebel and who didn’t toe the line and who was badly behaved and who spoke her mind and who was sort of chaotic and
entirely
herself and
didn’t give a shit what anybody thought about her on the surface and yet was so
deeply
vulnerable underneath
. The freedom and the sense of empowerment that I had as a seven year old little girl feeling like, ‘Oh my god, it’s okay to be like that! I feel like that.’ And also, she didn’t look like a normal Hollywood star. She’s got this interesting – I mean, she was phenomenally beautiful, but she’s not this kind of standard, across-the-board, ‘obvious’ look, that seemed to feel like one had to have if one was to go into acting at all. The kind of permission,
the strength, the maverick quality that she had, the energy was profoundly inspiring.
”

Image via Paramount Pictures

While Best did clock the quality of and importance of Channing’s work in Grease when she first watched the film, that significance was recently amplified when she got the chance to work alongside her.

“I didn’t realize quite how much it inspired me until I actually worked with her last year, and I couldn’t believe it. There were quite a few women on the show who were sort of similar to my age or my generation, and we were all like little kids. Literally, it was like Jesus was coming. It was like, ‘It’s Stockard Channing!’ The day she arrived on set, we were all sort of like nervous school girls because it’s like she was a hero.
She
is
a hero, absolutely, for us all, and as an expression of real feminine power and genuine beauty.”

Eve Best on the Most “Heavenly” Moments of Live Theater

Related ‘Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning Enlisted an Oscar-Winner to Help With Her Audition Gunning was willing to do what it took to play Martha in the Netflix series.

Turning the conversation to Best’s work on stage, I had to ask about the particular moment that made such an indelible impression on Gunning. While discussing the importance of being in the moment and working with the unexpected in live theater, Gunning recalled a particular performance of Best’s. “I went to see a play of Hedda Gabler with an amazing actress called Eve Best,” she began. “The first night I saw it, she was wearing this beaded necklace, and she made a move and the beads went everywhere, and she used this speech [and], one by one, she put the beads into this glass jar. I was like, ‘That bit was amazing!’” Gunning continued, “And then I saw it again and it didn’t happen, so she’d just done it in the moment because her necklace had broken.”

How exactly does one acquire the awareness to make such a choice, and how does one gain the skills to act on it? Best credits the world-renowned Globe Theatre in London.

“When we did
Hedda
, I hadn’t worked at The Globe, I don’t think, yet. The Globe is somewhere that teaches you that because it’s such an entirely immersive experience and
the audience is part of the action as much as the actors
. It’s a collective, and so that’s where that understanding is really hammered home, that you have to embrace every single thing that happens because there’s nowhere to hide. And actually, it’s the most useful and necessary thing to do because it’s when you’re the most alive and everybody is present in the room. Everybody sees that.”

Working such a mishap into a performance seamlessly can clearly produce stellar results, but Best also finds great value in the opposite. Sometimes things go wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it, but a shared recognition of a production hiccup with a packed house can be equally as magical. Here’s how Best put it:

“There are things that happened at The Globe, like we were doing scenes at one point, a very, very dramatic scene, very intense, and I was terribly cross. It was Beatrice and Benedick, and I was really giving Benedick welly, furious with him, and my skirt, the lacing had come undone, and it was gradually falling down my knees. I looked down, and I saw that it had fallen off, and
I just looked at the audience and we all just had to laugh
because it was just ludicrous. You can’t hide that stuff.”

Best added:

“I think those moments are actually heavenly for the audience because it’s when we all come out of the game.
The whole thing is that it’s an agreement. We all decide to play this game.
I’m gonna pretend something, and you’re gonna pretend that what I’m pretending is the case, and then we all go on this journey together. But then those moments when we all collectively come out of the game and can laugh or whatever it is, it’s heavenly.”

The Importance of Empathizing with Characters, Even on ‘House of the Dragon’

Related When To Watch HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2: Premiere Date, Episode Schedule, and More The battle for the Iron Throne will get started real soon.

One might think tackling a role with great confidence is the way to go when jumping into a new project, but Best prefers the opposite approach. She gravitates towards roles that “scare the shit out of [her].”

“It’s almost a criteria for the jobs that I take, if it scares the shit out of me. I feel like if I know how to play this when I read the script, if I get a sense of it, then I probably don’t need to do it. It’s those ones where you go, ‘I’ve got
no
idea how I could relate to this.’ I remember that with, I mean, all of them, actually. There are parts you yearn to play, like I always felt like I yearned to play Hedda, and I yearn to play Cleopatra, and I yearn to play all the Shakespeare heroines because I was more familiar with them. Then there were parts, like Josie in
A Moon for the Misbegotten
, the Eugene O’Neill play, and I was like, ‘I don’t know how the heck I can [play her].’ Actually, with Hedda, too. I thought, ‘I don’t know how I can get under the skin.’ Getting under the skin of these people who, when you read the script, they’re so profoundly anti-sympathetic, how can I get inside the head of this person who I feel like I don’t understand?”

An actor doesn’t have to agree with decisions a character makes, but it is vital they understand why those choices are made.

“That’s what’s so interesting, when you start empathizing with these characters. That’s what happens with [House of the Dragon], is that you start empathizing with profoundly, on paper, unsympathetic behavior, but you understand where it’s coming from. And so then you see yourself, and you see the humanity, and you see the vulnerability because, in the end, everybody’s vulnerable, and everybody’s terrified.

Everybody
is terrified, and all bad behavior comes from fear.
In the end, that’s really just exciting. The more I do it, the more it feels like it’s like a psychological experiment.”

Rhaenys Would Have Been a Great Queen
Image via HBO

When it comes to understanding Rhaenys’ choices in House of the Dragon, sometimes, it can’t be a premeditated thing for Best. That was the case for an especially tense conversation between Matt Smith’s Daemon and Rhaenys in Season 2, Episode 1, the one during which Daemon tells Rhaenys, “If you’d have acted when you had the chance, Aegon’s line would be extinguished and Luke would be alive.” Here’s what Best told me when asked how she pinpointed the right way from Rhaenys to respond to such a severe statement:

“I don’t know that that’s something that I could think through in that way prior to us doing it because
that stuff is sort of intangible
. So [much] to do with instinct and feeling. It’s not something that you can coordinate in your brain and plot through the stages. It’s very, very complicated for her. That knowledge is, of course, weighty. However, somebody else asked about regret, and ultimately,
what she’s got in her mind is a bigger picture
, and what she does or doesn’t do at the end of Episode 9 is to choose
not
to destroy.”

And that right there is why Rhaenys would have made an excellent Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Best continued:

“That’s the greatest example of magnificent, compassionate leadership.
It’s the most beautiful choice of ultimate power combined with ultimate mercy and love
, which is an example for the world, and why she would have made the most extraordinary leader. The fact that it results in the loss of this intensely precious and beautiful life, who happens to be her grandson, is horrendous beyond words, obviously, but in terms of the bigger context, that’s part of why she would have been such a great leader because
she can see the bigger context over the individual
.”

Eve Best Teases the Last Scene She Filmed for ‘House of the Dragon’ Season 2
Image via HBO

As always, this Collider Ladies Night interview wrapped up by asking Best for something she accomplished while making House of the Dragon Season 2 that she’s especially proud of. Her answer will likely leave you quite eager to see what’s to come this season.

“
I’m so proud of what I did in the last scene that I shot of the season
because it was intensely physically, emotionally, and spiritually demanding. Every job you feel like is the hardest one you’ve done until the next, but it felt like more so than any I’ve ever done. I got through it, and I didn’t indulge myself. I didn’t let my own feelings get in the way of the job I had to do, which I feel is exactly what Rhaenys does. She just gets on with it.”

Looking for even more from Best about her experience honing her craft as an actor, and her collaboration with Steve Toussaint in House of the Dragon? Be sure to watch our full Collider Ladies Night interview in the video at the top of this article, or you can listen to the conversation in podcast form below:

House of the Dragon The reign of House Targaryen begins with this prequel to the popular HBO series Game of Thrones. Based on George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, House of the Dragon is set nearly 200 years before Game of Thrones, telling the story of the Targaryen civil war with King Viserys.Release Date August 21, 2022 Creator Ryan J. Condal, George R.R. Martin Main Genre Drama Distributor HBO

House of the Dragon Season 2 kicks off on June 16 on Max.

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