Abubakar Salim plays Alyn of Hull in House of the Dragon a bastard sailor with a volatile streak and a difficult relationship with the man who fathered him. To build that character, Salim did not look to historical texts or stage tradition. He looked at Kratos.
Kratos is the central figure of the God of War series, a Spartan warrior who murdered his way to godhood, lost everything, and spent subsequent games trying to outrun the destruction he had caused while raising a son in a world that kept pulling him back toward violence. Salim saw something in that arc that mapped directly onto Alyn, and used it as a foundation throughout production.
What the two characters share
The connection goes beyond surface-level anger. Kratos is the son of Zeus, a lineage that brought him power and trauma in equal measure. Alyn is the unacknowledged son of Lord Corlys Velaryon, played by Steve Toussaint, a man whose recognition Alyn both resents needing and quietly wants.
Salim described both characters as men shaped by fathers who wronged them, who carry rage as a default state, and who are trying, with mixed results, to build something new. For Alyn, that tension plays out across his loyalty to House Velaryon and his growing, complicated bond with Corlys. For Kratos, it plays out across an entire mythology. The emotional core, according to Salim, is the same.
Alyn keeps that anger suppressed most of the time. He does his job, stays quiet, and keeps his distance. But the restraint is not peace. It is containment, and Salim says the cracks show in specific moments, particularly in a confrontation with Corlys in the season 2 finale.
The Battle of the Gullet
The most direct expression of that rage comes in the Battle of the Gullet, the naval centerpiece of the season 3 premiere. Alyn fights Admiral Sharako Lohar, a pirate played by Abigail Thorn, in what Salim describes as one of the most physically and emotionally demanding sequences of his career.
He and Thorn approached the scene with a shared intention to make it as brutal and unrestrained as possible. Salim said both actors came to set as self-described nerds who understood what they were channeling. He leaned entirely into Kratos during the fight, using the character’s ferocity and tunnel-vision aggression as a template for how Alyn moves and reacts when the last of his self-control falls away.
A performer who knows this world well
Salim’s connection to gaming is not casual. He starred in Assassin’s Creed Origins and has developed his own video game, which gives him a literacy with interactive storytelling that most actors working in prestige television do not have. He understands how game characters are constructed, what makes their emotional logic hold up across dozens of hours of play, and why someone like Kratos resonates across multiple generations of players.
That background informed how he brought Kratos into a live-action context without the performance becoming imitation. Alyn does not move like a video game character. But the emotional architecture underneath, the suppressed history, the dangerous capability, the hunger for something he cannot quite name, comes from the same source material Salim identified when he first read the role.
What comes next
House of the Dragon season 3 premieres on HBO on June 21, with new episodes releasing Sundays through Aug. 9. Alyn’s relationship with Corlys continues to develop as the season moves forward, and based on what Salim has described, the rage that has been carefully contained is not done finding its way out.
For a performer whose creative process runs through video games, fantasy novels, and prestige cable drama in equal measure, that tension is exactly where he wants to be.
