We hoped, we speculated, and now it’s (more or less) confirmed! Alys Rivers will be appearing in season 2 of House of the Dragon. Casting for her is currently underway and Emily Beecham is a contender for the role. **Spoilers for Fire and Blood and season 2 below**
Redanian Intelligence has published two videos of Emily Beecham, best known for playing the mysterious Maura Frank in Netflix’s 1899, reading for a character codenamed AR, who is … very obviously Alys Rivers.
In the first video, Alys is serving as “[Harrenhal]’s closest approximation” to a physician (ergo, the title of the video) and speaks with Daemon Targaryen after he’s “squabbled” with Rhaenyra. She dishes out some cool exposition on Harrenhal and offers Daemon a sleeping draught, which he apparently accepts because in the second video he asks her what she put in it. In both dialogues, Alys pokes at Daemon’s fragile ego and questions his loyalty to Rhaenyra.
I find the presence of sleeping draughts in these scenes interesting because in Fire and Blood Alys was rumored to have “used her poisons and potions to bind men to her, body and soul.” The fact that she’s giving Daemon herbal remedies that are having some sort of effect on him suggests that House of the Dragon intends to play into these rumors, or at least explain how they got started.
That said, fake scripts are typically used for audition scenes to avoid leaks, so we shouldn’t read too much into the precise wording of these dialogues (though boy, would I love “I’m no woman at all, I’m a barn owl. I was cursed to live in human form. Hoot-hoot,” to make the final cut). Still, this is our first look at any iteration of House of the Dragon‘s Alys Rivers and I, for one, am ecstatic.
