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Last season, House of the Dragon’s resident pirate queen mud-wrestled a man. In the season-three premiere, she’s fighting in water up to her neck.
“And fire and a wind machine,” notes Abigail Thorn, who brings Triarchy admiral Sharako Lohar to life — and now death. “I have acted in all four elements.”
Though she appears in just two episodes, the Lyseni naval commander makes an oversize impression. A rare female character in a position of military command and a fierce fighter in her own right, Lohar enjoys collecting knives and wives with equal gusto. Last season, she joined forces with Tyland Lannister (Jefferson Hall), master of ships for King Aegon II Targaryen (Tom Glynn-Carney), to bring her fleet into the war against the forces of Aegon’s rival half-sister, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy).
But Lohar’s not in it to dance with dragons. Her burning hatred of the so-called Sea Snake, Rhaenyra’s admiral Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), leads to a thrilling chase and a bloody hand-to-hand battle that’s among the most white-knuckle action the “Ice and Fire” franchise has produced. Even if Lohar herself doesn’t survive her final fight against the Sea Snake and his son Alyn of Hull (Abubakar Salim), Thorn’s love of combat choreography lives on.
“You can learn so much about a character through their physicality, and fighting is a part of that,” she says. “It’s great being able to choose the way a character kills someone. To know what that says about them is such a treat.”
What’s the vibe for you, post-dying?
It’s nothing but joy, actually! Sharako is all killer, no filler. Imagine they said to you, “Sean, we want you to come into work today, but we only want you to do the cool bits.” She’s not even afraid of dragons. There’s that fantastic moment where Tyland Lannister’s absolutely shitting his armor when Vermax comes firing in, and you can see me turn to him like, Check this shit out, playboy, and blow it out of the sky. That big grapnel’s not made of balsa wood. It’s very heavy. I did so many lateral raises for that scene. I even get the best line in the whole show: “Call me Lohar, Dragon Slayer!”
She really transcends her limited screen time. I was shocked to realize you’ve only been in two episodes. Why do you think her appearances have packed such a punch?
One is she’s the only woman in the Battle of the Gullet who’s not on a dragon, and one of the only characters onscreen who doesn’t have a beard. Also, because my voice is higher, you can always hear my [imitating sword-fighting noises] “Ha! Hah!” even when you can’t see my face. By dint of being female, she stands out.
There’s not a lot of roles for female action stars. Loni Peristere, the episode’s director, would say things to me in the mornings like, “You’re Sigourney Weaver in Aliens! You’re Linda Hamilton in Terminator! You’re Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde!” It’s a fairly short list, something we’ve not really seen in the Game of Thrones universe since Brienne of Tarth. That’s why she was such a pleasure to play.
There’s also something very interesting about being a strong, tall, muscular woman at this particular moment in Hollywood, because all the women I know are on Ozempic, and I’m on creatine. [Laughs.] It’s a fun dynamic.
Even by action-hero standards, this battle seemed demanding.
It was very physically demanding, which is why we trained for so long to do it. As soon as I got the contract for season three, I started hitting the gym, then trained with a stunt team, doing boxing and swordfighting training for a few months. I did so much work on her physicality as well. I modeled it on the tigers at the London Zoo, studying them and drawing diagrams. She’s low to the ground, she curls her toes, she’s gyrating those shoulders. I studied Hugh Jackman’s performance as Wolverine, because he has this explosive power to him but also this fluidity.
It was long hours and long days, but I like that as an actor, because the way you get better at something is by challenging yourself. I’ve wanted to be an action star for years, so if I’m not being challenged, I’m not improving. It was also very emotionally demanding. Fighting for your life is a stressful situation to be in! This is the most important day of Sharako’s life because it’s the day she finally gets to confront Corlys. Her life has been building to this for years. It’s a very stressful day for her. And remember, what we see is only a few hours of her life, but I spent three or four months in that battle.
She would follow me home at night. I found it difficult to sleep the first couple of weeks because she just wouldn’t let go. There was this moment in week two of filming where I went home one night, I was brushing my teeth before bed, I put my toothbrush down and just tiger-walked out of the bathroom. Then I was like, Okay, calm down, let it go. I had to come up with ways to put the character down in the evening.
You can feel the emotion in her fight with Corlys. There’s an insane, Hound-vs.-Mountain level of hostility there for her.
I was really inspired by Moby-Dick, because as soon as I read the script, it stood out to me that she’s Captain Ahab and Corlys Velaryon is Moby-Dick. I read the novel and I watched every adaptation I could get my hands on. She has the charisma that Captain Ahab does in the first half of that novel and then we see her cross the event horizon of madness. She sees this man’s ship and will not let it go.
I was sorry to see her dump Tyland Lannister overboard in order to keep up with Corlys’s ship.
The moment after she pushes Tyland off is the first time she’s like, “Right, you fuckers, pull the fucking oars and hold that course and fucking row.” That is the first time she swears at her men, the first time we’ve seen her be a tyrant instead of a “We’re all in this together, lads” leader. It’s significant that it’s when she gets rid of Tyland. We were having fun, kind of flirting a bit, being nice, then it’s like, Fuck, we’re in it now.
I was rereading Vulture’s interview with you last season, where you mentioned it was your idea to have Sharako’s gear loaded up with knives. When Corlys’s son Alyn kills her, it’s with one of those knives.
I was quite proud of this, because this was my decision: It’s the first one you see her using, when she’s eating the crab in her first scene. You see me put it back in my chest. Show the knife to the audience and you know exactly where it is, so it doesn’t come out of nowhere, right? She uses all of them in the episode except that one, and that’s the one she gets caught with. Storytelling! It’s so satisfying when a plan comes together.
Was her death a difficult place for you to get to as an actor?
That was one of the scenes I was most proud of. In the script, it’s really only two lines — it says something like “They fight and she’s killed” — and I got to decide how I wanted to play that. The obvious way to play it would have been that she fights to the bitter end and goes down with a sneer of hatred. I decided that in those final moments, she is afraid. I wanted the audience to sympathize with her and to see what this journey of revenge has cost her. The theme of this season is the cost of war, and I wanted to set us up for that.
Something that all the female reporters I’ve spoken to have picked up on is how that scene where she dies is a hard watch, because it’s a much larger man strangling a woman to death. I was never scared of being in physical danger during the battle, but there are moments that are emotionally difficult. I mean, being strangled underwater by a much bigger man is a scary thing. I have been attacked by men, as almost every woman has, and it is a scary thing to go through, even if it is just pretend. The emotions sink into your soul a little bit.
Even though we’ve seen her do all this stuff, there’s something about that which is hard to watch, and I deliberately chose to make that hard for you to watch. Fortunately, Abu is a very professional and kind guy. I remember when we watched it back, Abu said, “They’re gonna think I’m a monster. They’re gonna hate me.” I was like, “I know!”
Source: https://www.vulture.com/article/abigail-thorn-house-of-the-dragon-lohar-death-interview.html