This interview contains major spoilers for Season 3, Episode 6 of “House of the Dragon.”
After three seasons of playing Ser Criston Cole in HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” Fabien Frankel is no stranger to audience attention. He is curious to learn how that will change now that one of the most hated heels in Westeros is dead.
“A woman was driving her car today with her kids, and she pulled up next to me, and she’s like: ‘Criston Cole! I watched you last night!’” Frankel, 32, said in a video call last week, days ahead of his character’s gruesome demise in Sunday’s episode. “I wonder what it’ll be like on Monday: ‘Oh my God, you’re dead!’”
When Frankel’s stint began on “House of the Dragon,” a “Game of Thrones” prequel based on the George R.R. Martin novel “Fire & Blood,” Ser Criston was something of a romantic figure. His relationships with the rival queens Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower drove much of the conflict, and he came to be called the Kingmaker for his role in crowning Alicent’s son Aegon II. Ultimately, the humbly born Ser Criston was named the king’s hand.
But he soon saw his dreams of glory — along with the lives of thousands of soldiers — go up in dragonflame in Season 2. He has been a dour, nihilistic figure ever since.
Ser Criston has spent Season 3 on a long, disastrous slog through the enemy controlled Riverlands. In Episode 6, that death march finally ended in a particularly foul, brutal ambush. Archers’ arrows made poor Criston into a human pincushion, denying him his heroic final duel.
That’s just how Frankel likes it. “I’m relieved, to a degree,” he said from his mother’s apartment in London. “Criston Cole’s gone out in the way I wanted him to, and in a way that feels very in honor of what George R.R. Martin wrote.”
Frankel isn’t used to being dead yet, so his feelings, he acknowledged, are subject to change. “If you ask me again in a week, I’m sure I’ll have a clearer sense of what I feel about it,” he said.
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Ser Criston Cole does not go out in a blaze of glory. His death isn’t even the climax of the episode he dies in!
I kind of loved that. Dude, everyone, every article I read, I have never felt more of a sense of, “This guy has to go.” I’m excited to give the fans what they want. But I also don’t want them to feel like he’s gone and they can go to bed. I want them to feel like he’s gone, and then they’ve got to deal with a whole other 50 minutes of [expletive] that’s going to go wrong.
Every other character that’s been there since the beginning, like Jace [Harry Collett] or Rhaenys [Eve Best], they’re culminating episodes as deaths. Most people probably feel some excitement about Criston being killed, and they’re going to be denied that feeling. It happens so suddenly. I thought it was fitting. They can’t really feel as satisfied as they want to, which I’m happy about.
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Frankel with the director Loni Peristere. “There’s a kind of surrender that exists to shooting on location,” Frankel said, “especially in England, where you have such temperamental weather. Credit…Theo Whiteman/HBO
Criston embarks through a real odyssey this season, an attritional slog through the elements until he meets his final ambush. Was that as unpleasant to do as it looked?
Can I tell you the truth? It wasn’t. It was actually really joyful. It was the first time I was allowed out of the armor after three seasons, and that was such a heavy load off, physically and mentally. Here is this soldier, taken out of the wild, put into this incredibly Machiavellian, confined environment wherein everyone is fighting like dogs for power. He is setting himself free of that by going back where he started.
I was on location from start to finish, feeling a deep and profound sense of relief, getting out of this armor. As an actor, you yearn for that stuff, being out in the elements. At the best of times, I don’t like film studios. There’s a kind of surrender that exists to shooting on location, especially in England, where you have such temperamental weather. You really don’t know what you’re going to get.
Freddie Fox, who plays Gwayne, and I really felt we were the lucky ones. Olivia Cooke always says it: “I’m an indoor character, and you and Freddie are outdoor characters.” I certainly have no complaints about being an outdoor character.
You were having a good time — was Criston?
Sadly, yeah. I have friends who complain at the moments at which they have the thing they most want. They complain when they get there, but secretly, it’s the thing they know they’re really happy to do. The one thing we know Criston is good at is being a soldier. He doesn’t understand politics. I don’t even know if he’s a good general. But he started as a foot soldier, and that is what he’s good at. Something about him felt relieved. This is definitely his most enjoyable season, without a doubt.
When he made up his mind that there was no way out for him, that this was a suicide march, was that liberating for him?
Massively. It was liberating for me as an actor to feel that, as well. When one knows the end is nigh, it’s very hard not to live in the present because you don’t have a choice. You can only live now. If I were to look at the moments of Criston Cole’s life where he’s been happy, if there have been any, I would say that on the battlefield in this episode is one of them. Cole lives at his happiest close to death.
Suicidal despair seemed to set in for him after his first encounter with dragonfire on the battlefield last season.
Sara Hess wrote it so beautifully in Episode 8 of Season 2: “The dragons dance, and men are like dust under their feet. And all our fine thoughts, all our endeavors are as nothing. We march now toward our annihilation.”
There was a scene that never made it into the cut, where Criston goes to Alicent’s quarters and collapses crying in her arms, and she holds him like a child. The nature of the beast is that sometimes scenes just don’t make it. But for me as an actor, I remember doing that scene with Olivia. It was the final scene of the whole of Season 2, and we wrapped as soon as the scene wrapped. I felt that was the moment: the admission of all the wrongdoing, all of the guilt, all of the realization that ultimately his annihilation is his own doing. He’s caused and created so much of the mayhem around him.
Just before he embarks on his final, fatal campaign, Criston daydreams of Alicent singing songs of his death. He wraps her favor around his sword hilt as he makes his last stand. I was surprised she was still so close to his mind.
I don’t know, man. I’ve been in love a small handful of times, and it’s very hard to think about anything else. The people you think about when the end is near are the people you love. He doesn’t have a father, a mother, siblings, a wife, children. What has this man loved? Alicent is the only true thing he’s loved. It doesn’t feel surprising to me that she’s so prevalent in his final moments.
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