House of the Dragon Season 2 premieres on HBO and Max this Sunday, June 16, marking almost two years since Game of Thrones fans have last visited Westeros. During that lengthy hiatus, devoted fans speculated over which horrific parts of George R.R. Martin‘s Fire & Blood the show would tackle next.
They also nurtured numerous fan theories about House of the Dragon, from the idea that sneaky Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) was warging into the castles’ rats to spy on the royals to the notion that maybe — just maybe — the sensitive Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) should have been married to a kinder, gentler, nobler relative than her selfish older brother Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney).
In House of the Dragon Season 1, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) even tries to avoid a fissure in the family tree by betrothing Helaena to her eldest son and heir, Prince Jacaerys “Jace” Velaryon (Harry Collett). The proposal seems reasonable to her father King Viserys (Paddy Considine), but Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) rejects it outright because she believes Rhaenyra’s son is a bastard.
Fans, however, not only noticed a lovely moment in House of the Dragon Season 1 Episode 8 “The Lord of Driftmark” where Helaena and Jace share a sweet dance, but the reality that their marriage literally would have prevented the oncoming civil war in Season 2.
“Yeah!” House of the Dragon star Phia Saban said when Decider brought this alternative match up during a recent roundtable interview. “That was nice. He’s a nice boy.”
“That’s lovely. I would have wanted that,” Olivia Cooke said, perhaps forgetting it’s what her character blocked on the show.
Nevertheless, there is another character fans speculate shares a deeper connection with Helaena and that’s her younger brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell). The “Helaemond” ‘ship seizes upon subtle moments in House of the Dragon Season 1 where actors Phia Saban and Ewan Mitchell seem to drift towards each other onscreen. That, coupled with a scene where the younger version of Aemond literally offers to marry Helaena in Aegon’s disgusted stead, have inspired fans to speculate that Helaena and Aemond might secretly be in love.
“I’ve seen them all, for sure,” Phia Saban said. “I mean, sometimes Ewan [and I] will be doing a scene and we’ll be like, ‘Do it for Helaemond.’ And he’s like, ‘You know what the people want.’”
“I mean, sometimes Ewan [and I] will be doing a scene and we’ll be like, ‘Do it for Helaemond.’ And he’s like, ‘You know what the people want.’”
Phia Saban
Ewan Mitchell confirmed this later that same day in another roundtable interview Decider attended with him.
“I think it’s nice to leave, you know, little seeds out there for the audience to kind of create their own theories on things,” Mitchell said.
“I mean, Targaryen-ism is known for that,” he said, referring to the incestuous nature of such a romance. “And so it’s not entirely out of the question. But I mean, I don’t know, it’s an interesting theory for sure.”
Phia Saban revealed that what the pair of them love about “Helaemond” is that their characters’ chemistry “didn’t come from the script at all.”
“Maybe it was a coronation,” Saban said, referring to the moment where Aemond shields his sister when Eve Best’s Rhaenys threatens Team Green during Aegon’s coronation, “or maybe it was before then, I think they let Helaena off where I just ended up standing next to him quite a lot.”
“It just felt like Helaena felt safer with Aemond than she did with Aegon and that they’ve got something, some affinity there.”
Cooke, who plays all three characters’ mother, then mused that maybe it’s because Saban had worked with Mitchell before House of the Dragon on the beloved Netflix show The Last Kingdom. (Mitchell played Osferth, one of Uhtred’s pack of heroic warriors, while Saban was Æthelflæd’s daugther, Ælfwynn.)
“Yeah, we worked together in The Last Kingdom. He is probably quite a safe person for me when I came onto set and stuff. I know Tom as well actually. It’s a very small, incestuous—” Saban caught herself. “Well, not that incestuous.” The whole group laughed.
“And working with Phia Saban is one of the highlights of the job for sure,” Mitchell said, echoing his co-star’s enthusiasm. “I mean, she’s just phenomenal in this series. Now you guys know, she really does kill it.”
Even though Saban and Mitchell love the fact that fans have latched onto their characters, Saban admitted that some of the theories have shocked her nonetheless.
“Yeah, we had a sort of thing when we went like, ‘Oh, I think they quite like each other,’ but we didn’t expect it to be what then was online, which was like, he’s the father of her child, which I don’t know,” Saban said.
“Strange, isn’t it?” Cooke mused.
“Yeah, it is, but I just like that people find fun things in it,” Saban said. “That’s nice. It’s always nice to be engaged with.”
“Helaemond” fans will have to tune into the new season of House of the Dragon when it premieres on Sunday, June 16 to find out if there any of Saban and Mitchell’s fandom-pleasing takes made the HBO show’s final cut.