Trivia / House of the Dragon

• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Paddy Considine's very King Lear-esque take on King Viserys was mostly his own, and George R. R. Martin was fully onboard with it.
  • Adult Aegon switching his majestic Targaryen locks for a shorter, greasier hairstyle came at the behest of Tom Glynn-Carney, who felt like his character needed a more bedraggled appearance to suit his messy persona.
• All-Star Cast: The Japanese dub, just like the one from Game of Thrones, spared no expense in bringing in many well-known veteran Anime voice actors for the leads, including Kenyuu Horiuchi (Viserys I Targaryen), Saori Hayami (Rhaenyra Targaryen), Kenjiro Tsuda (Daemon Targaryen), Maaya Sakamoto (Alicent Hightower), Akio Ōtsuka (Corlys Velaryon), Atsuko Tanaka (Rhaenys Targaryen), Jun'ichi Suwabe (Criston Cole), Hōchū Ōtsuka (Otto Hightower) and many more.
• Content Leak: The entirety of the season 1 finale leaked online two days before it was due to air.
• Creator Backlash: Olivia Cooke has commented on how she did not like Alicent's "foot scene" with Larys, mostly because it once again degraded Alicent after she finally stood her ground against her father, but also because she doesn't like the idea of people looking up pictures of her feet. She also dislikes how shocked the general audience was by the scene, in comparison to all the way worse things that happened in just that episode, and previously.
  Cooke: It is wild, because there are beheadings, people getting their cocks cut off, graphic violence and brothel scenes, but getting my feet out and him wanking off, that's the most shocking. It's funny, isn't it? ... It's wild how you can’t predict which scenes people have the biggest reactions to, and unfortunately it was that one.
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: George R. R. Martin admits in answering fan questions through HBO's Twitter account that he actually liked the significant Adaptation Personality Change given to King Viserys I—describing his show iteration (as portrayed by Paddy Considine) as something more akin to King Lear, and thus more compelling and sympathetic to watch.
• Darkhorse Casting: Milly Alcock had small roles in some Australian series before being cast as the central role of young Rhaenyra Targaryen. She worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant when she got the part.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Milly Alcock played 15-year-old Rhaenyra when she was 21 (the Time Skips between each episode of Season 1 make Rhaenyra closer to her age however). It's a bit less pronounced for Emily Carey as Alicent at the beginning of the series (Carey was 18 when the series was filmed) then inverted when the time skips make Alicent older than her actress by a few years.
  • Matthew Needham (Larys Strong) is 5 years older than his on-screen elder brother Ryan Corr (Harwin Strong) and their on-screen father Gavin Spokes (Lyonel Strong) is only five years older then Matthew.
  • Aegon Targaryen, at age 13, is played by Ty Tennant, who was 19 at the time of filming. Since his first episode as a teenager involves him masturbating in the nude in front of an open window, this was unavoidable. When Aegon reached 19 years old, Tennant was recasted with Tom Glynn-Carney, who was 26 at the time of filming.
  • A mix of age-appropriate and Dawson casting is used strategically in the case of Laena Velaryon. When Laena's 12, she's played by also-12-year-old Nova Foueillis-Mosé to make her look way too young for Viserys to marry. At Rhaenyra's wedding, Laena is 15 and now played by 25-year-old Savannah Steyn, to make her look old enough for Daemon. A decade later, when Laena is around 25, she's played by 35-year-old Nanna Blondell. The ages of Savannah Steyn and Nanna Blondell both obfuscate that mathematically, Laena is uncomfortably young for Daemon to be pursuing. Daemon's later line to Rhaenyra, "I spared you. You were a child," would land differently if the audience remembered that he promptly turned around and pursued an even younger girl.
  • Dawson Casting is used strategically in the teen boys. Aemond and Jace are close in age — both around 16 by the end of season 1 — but Aemond is played by Ewan Mitchell (25) while Jace is played by Harry Collett (18). Aemond looking older and Jace looking younger underlines a narrative point. When they're 9–10 in episode 1.06, we see Alicent teaching her sons there are life-and-death stakes, and Rhaenyra refusing to discuss with her sons what their bastardy means for them. Fast forward to the recast, and we have a dangerous, competent Aemond who had to grow up too fast and appears older than he is; and a sweet young Jace who was shielded from the hash realities of this world, who looks like the teenager he is, and is far less prepared to face it than Aemond is.
• Demand Overload: HBO Max servers crashed on the premiere day due to so many people tuning in at the same time.
• Development Gag: Black Velaryons are not a wholly new idea. Black Valyrians are an idea George R. R. Martin has previously talked about considering since the early 2010s, although that was 20 years too late to include in books. The show provided a retroactive second chance for that.
  GRRM on his blog, July 2013: Right from the start I wanted the Targaryens, and by extension the Valryians from whom they were descended, to be a race apart, with distinctive features that set them apart from the rest of Westeros, and helped explain their obsession with the purity of their blood. To do this, I made a conventional 'high fantasy' choice, and gave them silver-gold hair, purple and violet eyes, fine chiseled aristocratic features. That worked well enough, at least in the books (on the show, less so).
  But in recent years, it has occurred to me from time to time that it might have made for an interesting twist if instead I had made the dragonlords of Valyria... and therefore the Targaryens... black. Maybe I could have kept the silver hair too, though... no, that comes too close to 'dark elf' territory, but still... if I'd had dark-skinned dragonlords invade and conquer and dominate a largely white Westeros... though that choice would have brought its own perils. The Targaryens have not all been heroic, after all... some of them have been monsters, madmen, so...
  Well, it's all moot. The idea came to me about twenty years too late.
• Dueling Works: The series was released in summer 2022 just like another high profile Fantasy Series in the post-Game of Thrones landscape, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (both premiered less than 15 days apart in August / September 2022). Both also happen to be prequels set hundreds of years before a main saga/main Myth Arc. Interestingly, Ryan Condal first developed a Conan the Barbarian series for Amazon at the same time as Rings of Power, and that Conan series project ended up scrapped in favor of The Wheel of Time. Condal then jumped ship at HBO and made House of the Dragon. The duel carries over for Season 2 of both series in 2024.
• Irony as She Is Cast:
  • Rhaenyra, whose status as the official royal heir in a world of tightly set gender roles kicks off the entire plot, is played by the openly non-binary Emma D'Arcy.
  • Young Alicent, who fully abides by the set strict gender roles of her world, is played by queer actress Emily Carey (she/they), a feminist who rejects such sexist gender norms.
• On-Set Injury: Matt Smith injured a disc in his neck while filming for the show during a stunt.
• Playing Their Own Twin: Jefferson Hall plays both twin brothers Jason and Tyland Lannister.
• Real-Life Relative: Erryk and Arryk Cargyll are identical twin brothers, and so are their actors Elliott and Luke Tittensor.
• The Red Stapler: In a curious meta moment, a promotional interview snippet of Emma D'Arcy naming a Negroni Sbagliato^note The addendum "with prosecco" was just an elaboration on their part and is not necessary for ordering, as the prosecco is what differentiates a Negroni Sbagliato from a regular Negroni. their drink of choice has turned the cocktail into the trend beverage of late 2022, haunting bartenders all over the globe for months.
• Self-Adaptation: Like the parent show, George R. R. Martin is involved in the production.
• Separated-at-Birth Casting:
  • The facial resemblance between Emma D'Arcy and Milly Alcock (adult and young Rhaenyra respectively) is absolutely uncanny. They are also both very believable as the daughter of Siân Brooke (Aemma Arryn) and Paddy Considine (Viserys).
  • Slightly more debated, but still widely regarded as formidable is the resemblance between Alicent's two actresses Emily Carey and Olivia Cooke.
  • The Targaryen/Velaryon children get less screentime, but the pairing of Harvey Sadler and Elliot Grihault (child and teen Lucerys respectively) is a standout.
  • Roger Evans (Borros Baratheon) is highly believable as an ancestor of Mark Addy (Robert Baratheon).
  • Uncle and nephew Daemon (Matt Smith) and Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) also share the same angular facial features. It makes sense, as the characters are meant to be foils and counterparts to each other.
  • Tom Glynn-Carney bears a striking resemblance to Olivia Cooke, who plays his character's mother.
  • Leo Ashton (young Aemond) and Emma D'Arcy (adult Rhaenyra) also have similar facial features.
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy:
  • The Funko Pop! figure for the dragon Caraxes noticeably lacks his trademark long neck and the large fins on his legs, looking too much like Syrax but recolored, while the two beasts look very different from each other.
  • Speaking of Syrax's figure, she looks like a barely modified dragon model from the Game of Thrones line, while she's clearly a different breed of dragon compared to Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion.
• Those Two Actors:
  • Ewan Mitchell and Phia Saban, who play Aemond and Helaena Targaryen, appeared in The Last Kingdom together. Their characters in that show were also related, with Saban playing Mitchell's niece.
  • This is the second time Ty Tennant and Tom Glynn-Carney have played the younger and older versions of the same character. They both play Aegon Targaryen after having played Christopher Wiseman in Tolkien.
• Throw It In!:
  • The shot of Alicent laughing at Otto, who is jokingly clapping at Jacaerys and Helaena, was actually unscripted, as Rhys Ifans had a reputation for making people laugh on set, and Olivia Cooke was actually laughing at him. Though it's not obvious as the voices are muted, Cooke is actually saying "Stop making me laugh".
  • The scene of Daemon placing the crown on Viserys' head wasn't scripted but was improvised during rehearsal by Smith and Considine after the crown accidentally slipped off Considine's head and ended up incorporated into the scene during filming.
• Troubled Production:
  • Production of the show was halted several times due to positive cases on set during the COVID-19 Pandemic, although for less than a week each time (production started in April 2021, and by then movie/TV productions had strong enough regulations and safety measures in place to avoid weeks/months-long shutdowns that plagued many TV and film productions in 2020). Still, in the "Making of Season 1" book that came out subsequently, Ryan Condal and his team admitted that filming during the pandemic was a nightmare and they downplayed just how much it screwed up the early months of production. As Condal explained, it wasn't just that the set builders couldn't work in lockdown, the lumber mills themselves were in lockdown, so there was a global timber shortage and the price of construction materials skyrocketed. The famous three story set they built for the Red Keep wasn't even finished when it was supposed to be in April, and couldn't actually be used until June. Ultimately the way they worked around this was to hastily revise their filming schedule, to film all of the exterior on-location stuff first in spring, and then by summer the COVID lockdowns started to ease up and the sets were finally finished.
  • Director Greg Yaitanes explained in a May 2022 interview that filming itself went quite smoothly, despite the rapid rescheduling...up until the very end of the shoot. Exterior filming wrapped on schedule in early November, when they finished filming in Spain and Portugal. They still had a small number of important interior scenes they had to film, however, which were things that they couldn't simply cut for time. By early December, they were about "two weeks away" from a complete wrap...but then the COVID Omicron variant spiked in mid-December (which isn't nearly as harmful as prior variants but a lot more contagious). As Yaitanes put it, for the next three months, they were perpetually "just two weeks away from being finished" — but every few days a new crewmember would get the Omicron variant, then they'd have to shut down, then start up again, only to then shut down again. It was all the more frustrating because they had only a handful of scenes left to film, but it kept dragging on. Ryan Condal himself got COVID the same week they wrapped (right after Valentine's Day), and Yaitanes got COVID by May.
• Underage Casting: Alicent Hightower is played by 28-year-old Olivia Cooke. Her firstborn son Aegon is played by 19-year-old Ty Tennant, meaning there's only a 9-year difference between them. Even for a Medieval European Fantasy where Alicent had him in her teens, it's a stretch. This gets more pronounced when her children are aged up again by the end of season 1, all three being played by actors in their early 20s while Alicent isn't even showing crow's feet.
• Voice-Only Cameo: Of sorts. Emma D'Arcy makes their physical debut as adult Rhaenyra in the sixth episode of Season 1, but they're heard doing the Opening Monologue in the first episode.
• Voiced Differently in the Dub: Young Rhaenyra Targaryen's voice in the French dub, Thaïs Laurent, sounds significantly different compared to Milly Alcock (Cavanna was born in 1985, Alcock in 2000).
• What Could Have Been: See here.
• Word of God: Although there's been no reference to him in the first season, the October 11, 2022 entry on George Martin's blog states that Daeron Targaryen, youngest - and nicest - son of Alicent and Viserys, has not been Adapted Out and is currently in Oldtown (where he was Ormund Hightower's squire, per the books).
• Word of Saint Paul:
  • Throughout season 1, Viserys is suffering from an unnamed disease that causes his limbs to decay. Paddy Considine confirmed his character was suffering from a type of leprosy.
  • According to Emily Carey, Alicent has a crush on Ser Criston Cole in the first few episodes, before their sworn sword/liege lady relationship begins.
  • Both sets of actors playing Rhaenyra and Alicent have suggested that the two might have had romantic feelings for each other in their youth.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Jefferson Hall, who plays twin brothers Jason and Tyland Lannister, also played a minor role in Game of Thrones as Jon Arryn's former squire Ser Hugh.
  • In the European French dub, Loïc Houdré voiced Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones, and now voices Ser Harrold Westerling.
• Working Title: "Red Gun".

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