House of the Dragon star Olivia Cooke recently recalled the awkward behind-the-scenes hilarity of filming one of the Game of Thrones spinoff's dramatic moments.
Cooke discussed the unexpected humor of shooting the scene in which Queen Alicent Hightower slaps Prince Aegon Targaryen in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "I had to hit Tom [Glynn-Carney] really hard in the scene," she said. "And Tom, being Tom, was like, 'No, just hit me.' The first go-around, I clipped him on his chin. And he was like, 'No, just really wall at me,' and I just really fucking went for it to the point where it echoed all the way through the hall, and my hand suddenly had a heartbeat. Luckily the camera's on Tom, and I was completely taken out of the scene [because I was] trying to suppress a really awkward laugh. God knows what it did to his face… We only did it once or maybe twice. But it was like, 'Oh my God, don't mess with you.'"
The heated conversation between Alicent and Aegon is one of several intense scenes in House of the Dragon's first season. Another is when King Viserys I Targaryen dies, a moment that star Paddy Considine unpacked in a recent interview. According to Considine, Viserys calls out to his dead wife, Queen Aemma, because he had a vision of her as he died. Considine added that Aemma's death marked the beginning of Visery's "downfall" and said that the monarch "never gets over" the tragedy during his lifetime.
HotD Star Discusses Season 1's Creepiest Scene
Then there's the scene in which Larys Strong (Matthew Needham) pleasures himself at the sight of Alicent's bare feet. Needham has since explained that the unsettling scene wasn't meant to suggest that Larys has a foot fetish, but rather something more psychologically complex. "This is a very disturbed person with a lot of trauma... It's about making her feel as much shame as she does for that part of her body as he does for his... I don't see it like he loves feet. It's the fact that she's not into it and he can make her do it," he said.
Not all of House of the Dragon's most shocking moments skew so cerebrally, though. The mid-air death of Lucerys (Elliot Grihault) and his mount Arrax in the Season 1 finale, "The Black Queen," was a decidedly more visceral affair. Director Greg Yaitanes later revealed that he and the cinematographer Pepe Avila del Pino choreographed Lucerys' exit using toys, which is ironic given the brutal nature of the finished scene.
House of the Dragon Season 1 is currently streaming on HBO and HBO Max.
Source: THR