The king is dead. Long live…the queen? That’s certainly the hope for Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) as she leads House of the Dragon into the endgame of its first season, with veteran director Greg Yaitanes flying right at her side behind the scenes.
Yaitanes—an award-winning director who, not unlike Aemond Targaryen claiming Vhagar, secured a directing Emmy for House in 2008 against the likes of the Breaking Bad and Mad Men pilots—is the man behind the lens for “The Black Queen,” the House of the Dragon season finale that takes its name from Rhaenyra’s fearsome title. With a litany of television credits under his belt, including household names like Lost, Yaitanes’s description of the finale sets the bar very high. As he tells Vanity Fair, “If I have five things that I, in 30 years [of directing] am most proud of, this is absolutely on that list.”
Heading into the finale, the stakes in Westeros are as high as they’ve been all season long. With the recent death of Paddy Considine’s Viserys Targaryen, House Hightower’s slow-simmering ambitions for the Iron Throne are now fully boiled. In season one’s penultimate episode, “The Green Council,” Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and her allies made their first move, installing Viserys’s son Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney) as the new king of the realm. For her part, the late king’s daughter and true heir, Rhaenyra, was completely absent from the hour, unaware of her father’s death, let alone the theft of the throne. Expect that information to land early in the finale, and to land hard, according to Yaitanes.
“You have to imagine, who haven’t you answered for in episode nine?” he says about what viewers should expect from the final episode of the season. “And what would they be experiencing with the news that is going to inevitably reach them?”
Those who have read George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood have some insight into how Rhaenyra’s family will react to the news, especially after watching HBO’s finale trailer, which hints at one of the book’s hardest-hitting deaths. For his part, Yaitanes was among the first people to learn what the episode would entail, having powered through the full first season’s scripts in a single weekend. Where some would walk away intimidated by the emotional toll of the episode, Yaitanes felt exhilarated. “I really connected with it,” he says, though his lips are sealed on the specific elements that stood out to him most.
Just as the finale boasts twists that will change House of the Dragon forever, much of Yaitanes’s own journey through Westeros has played out unexpectedly. For one thing, he says he was originally going to direct the seventh episode, “Driftmark,” before scheduling left him directing episode two, “The Rogue Prince.” (Yaitanes says he was always meant to direct the third episode, “Second of His Name,” due to his experience helming action-heavy sequences on shows such as the Cinemax dramas Banshee and Quarry.) For another, Yaitanes says he almost directed episodes of the original Game of Thrones; once again, scheduling issues got in the way. Still, heading into the prequel series, Yaitanes wanted to immerse himself in as much Thrones content as possible, leading him to rewatch the entire series, his third time through Westeros.
“I know that it took it on the chin a little bit, but I really appreciated that last season,” he says of his takeaways from the rewatch. “When you really watch it straight through, everything is earned, and it’s right there, and it’s been telling you everything all along. And the fact that I could sit in those episodes, which were kind of mini-movies at that point, I ended up really having love for it…not just for the whole experience of the journey, but really that last season.”
