Matt Smith dons super blonde Targaryen wig in official House Of The Dragon images
TV Features House of the Dragon
HBO is stepping back into the vast world of Game Of Thrones with long-awaited spinoff, House Of The Dragon. The fantasy drama is set 300 years in the past and focuses on the Targaryens, specifically on King Viserys (The Outsider’s Paddy Considine) and his younger brother, Prince Deamon, played by Doctor Who and The Crown star Matt Smith.
The cable network recently announced it had finally started production on the series, including a socially distanced cast table read. Now the first images are here to tide us over. It’s only three new photos but those costumes, the doom-and-gloom expressions, and the uber-blonde Targaryen wigs perfectly fit into the Game Of Thrones universe.
We get the official look at Smith as Prince Deamon, who is touted as a “peerless warrior and a dragon rider” in the show synopsis. He is sharing space with Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen, played by Emma D’Arcy. She is the King’s firstborn child but her claim to the throne is challenged because of her gender.
We also get a glimpse at another family, the Hightowers. The Amazing Spider-Man’s Rhys Ifans plays Otto Hightower, the loyal Hand to King Viserys, who sees Prince Deamon as the greatest threat to the realm. Bates Motel and Sound Of Metal’s Olivia Cooke plays his daughter, Alicent, who might turn into a power player because of her political skills, courtesy of growing up in the Red Keep.
Finally, HBO also released the first photo of It’s A Sin’s Steve Toussaint as the Sea Snake or Lord Corlys Velaryon, belonging to a Valyrian bloodline as old as House Targaryen. He’s a brilliant and adventurous man who is the husband to Princess Rhaenys Targaryen, played by Eve Best. He built his house into a powerful seat that is even richer than the Lannisters and claims the largest navy in the world.
Game Of Thrones, which ran for eight seasons and ended in 2019, was a massive hit for HBO. Even if the final couple of seasons weren’t as creatively successful, a number of potential sequels and spinoffs were announced that got nixed, including a pilot starring Naomi Watts set 10,000 years before the events of the show. House Of The Dragon is the only one that got greenlit. The upcoming series is based on George R.R. Martin’s book, Fire & Blood.
The cast also includes Fabien Frankel as Ser Criston Cole and Sonoya Mizuno as Mysaria, a trusted ally of Prince Daemon. Martin and Ryan Condal serve as co-creators and Miguel Sapochnik is the showrunner with Condal. House Of The Dragon is expected to drop sometime in 2022 on HBO Max.
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They’re also doing another show about Corlys Velaryon, the “Nine Voyages” adaptation. Is he going to be the lead in that, or will they cast a younger actor?
I got a crisp twenty says that series never happens.
There’s a good chance it dies if House of the Dragon gets a tepid response. But otherwise it’s apparently the most far along of the other adaptations – they’ve got a creative team, etc. We’ll know if they’re serious enough to shoot a pilot for it if they start casting (whether or not it gets beyond the pilot is another matter – the “Long Night” series shot a pilot episode* and then was quietly killed).* I hope that leaks out at some point.
I’ve got a moldy, mushy coke-encrusted fiver.
I’ll be that guy. Prince Daemon is not Rhaenyra’s brother, he’s her uncle.
That’s the beauty of GOT, it can be both!
I’ll be the well actually person (spoilers):I believe he is technically, her brother-by-law, her uncle, and her husband.
I think you’re mistaking Matt Smith for Phoebe Bridgers.
Did Matt Smith fail to smash a Danelectro guitar?
Found David Crosby’s burner account!
HA!
if HBO thinks I’ll watch a Thrones spinoff without any full penetration, they’ve got another thing coming.
It honestly feels like WB kind of screwed themselves over when they let B&W end the series as they did. It’s self-evident that they would not have minded one or two more seasons. I honestly don’t get why they just didn’t find someone else to be showrunner for two extra seasons because B&W were already running on fumes.
My understanding is that B&W refused and it was their choice to make.
It’s baffling that they chose to do so and yet clearly needed more time to tell the ending.
Yeah, I can sympathize a bit in the sense that I’ve worked on multi-year projects, and know what it feels like to just want to wrap everything up.I just wish that they’d had enough humility to realize that they were burnt out and needed to pass the torch. I don’t think anyone would have held it against them, and it’s hard to imagine their successor(s) doing worse with more time to set up the finale.
It’s sad to watch that last season and see all the effort everyone put in, even though the direction just wasn’t all there. You’re right, even if they just went to EP credits and let one of the series veterans helm the final season, perhaps we’d’ve had a longer, adequate ending.
Yeah, it’s still a momumental achievement. The writing/plotting was just so rushed that you felt like B&W were just ticking checkboxes on their way to Martin’s planned conclusion.The last couple of seasons were like that, really: And then, and then, and then, the end. Characters stopped behaving like themselves, people’s motivations became muddled, the Jon/Dany romance didn’t track at all on screen (other characters had to literally comment on it before I even realized it was happening), Bran’s endpoint came out of nowhere, The Long Night turned out to be a wet firecracker… it goes on and on.All those elements could have worked if they’d been developed further, but that just didn’t happen, and here we are.It’s kind of funny that the TV series ended up having the opposite problem of the books. Martin planned a tight series but ended up getting bogged down by too many tangents and characters, making the writing process incredibly laborious. B&W planned a faithful adaptation of the books, but ended up trimming down the content so much that it was no longer cogent/coherent.Still stoked about the new series though! For better or worse, I love the world that Martin created.
Martin planned a tight series but ended up getting bogged down by too many tangents and characters, making the writing process incredibly laborious.I seem to remember the big problem was waiting around for the Stark kids to “age up” into their eventual roles. Martin originally planned on a big time jump, but then realized it wouldn’t work since Westeros was too unstable and couldn’t stay static for long enough for it to be feasible.
So, instead of following the characters we had an investment in, he needed to create a bunch of new characters for us to follow while we waited around for Bran and Sansa and Arya to grow old enough to do the stuff they needed to do.
Makes them sound like control freaks tbh, if they’d rather do a rush-job themselves than let someone else do it better.So glad they’re not doing Star Wars.
I’ll be interested to see their further works, after all it was only one season that was truly terrible- they’d done considerably well for years prior.The Three Body Problem could turn out great as well.
I think they had a potential showrunner right there too with Brian Cogman, who actually appreciated the source material. A lot of weird decisions around those last two seasons.
I always thought it would be an interesting night to sit down with Cogman and a fine bottle of whisky, and hear his off-the-record opinions on just how badly the boys screwed up once they lost Martin’s source material. I imagine he has some real stories that won’t be shared with the public.
Agreed. Mr Biblioteca and I binged-rewatched the entire show on Lockdown V1 and it goes from great to “what the hell happened!?” in the course of two seasons. And we never got the indepth look at Dorne that a lot of fans wanted (and not nearly half of the Sand Snakes – something I still find inexcusable).
If they’d have approached the first season the way they approached the final season, Ned Stark would’ve been dead half way through the pilot.
Apparently they wanted to end it themselves instead of stepping down and handing it off to someone else. Didn’t HBO offer to hire more writers for them to work with, too?
B&W refused because they saw those Star Wars dollar signs on the horizon. But then they completely shot themselves in the foot by delivering absurdly subpar seasons, and then Star Wars went away.
What happened to the prequel : “Better Call Tyrion’?
I don’t know what their contracts said. It’s possible that wasn’t an option, but I do think you also have to recognize that B&W did not think they were going to have to make up the ending from an outline. No one expected Winds of Winter not to be done. I’m not even sure before Season 2 that HBO was confident they would make the whole series. I am sympathetic to writers who were like “we have all these plot threads and no details on someone else’s intricate world to wrap them up.” Do I think they should have taken more episodes to do it? Yes. Do I think HBO also took a big misstep in insisting on 2 short seasons in order to double qualify for Emmys? I do. Not least of all because it cut the momentum of what could have been the final season and ended up with filler because each mini-season had to build to a finale.
I’ll give it a go.
Oooh, making the Velaryons dark-skinned is a cool idea. He’s got the hair (and they dropped the eyes for the show), it totally works.
That’s not going to stop the “we’re not racist! we’re just really, really, really, obsessively invested in the accurate depiction of fictional fantasy characters living in a fictional fantasy world! we’re not racist!” crowd, though.
True, but counter-point:
fuck ‘em
The only counterpoint they deserve.
*The only counterpoint we can think of. Thinking is hard.
Ha, one of them made an account just to prove the point. Hey: fuck you.
Since we’re handing out “fuck you’s” to people we disagree with today, here’s one from me.
Had to make an account just to tell you what a cowardly virtue signaling annoyance you people are. How sad is it being part of a side that has so few arguments, they consistently resort to the same tired, boring, meaningless, overused word?
Well those neckbeards can go merrily fuck themselves.
Oooh, making the Velaryons dark-skinned is a cool idea.And it doesn’t really contradict anything we know about them, either. The Andals and the First Men might have been stubborn about racial purity, but the Valyrians? Martin has been very tight-lipped about what went on in Old Valyria. All we really know about them is that the Targaryens were one of many Dragonriding families, and the Velaryons were some of their closest allies.
So the Velaryons were the Targaryens’ “black friends?”
The fact that you think this shows how little you know about the world of ASOIF. Maybe stop playing twister to make this ridiculous casting make sense, and start reading?
Perhaps wrongly, I got the sense that Old Valyria and the Doom were analogous to the Fall of Rome in GRRM’s books. Valyria was an advanced society known for its technology, education, and imperial might, before its dissolution led to a Dark Age, which was loosely the way late-medieval Europe conceived of the Roman Empire.And Rome figured ethnicity very differently from later history. It was a way more cosmopolitan and multicultural place than medieval Europe; many post-Julian emperors were from the Balkans or Gaul or the Middle East (the historic ruling class was, of course, Italian.) Black and brown people from Africa and Asia were a normal part of Roman civic life, so it stands to reason the Valyrians would’ve been like that, too.
Martin has been very tight-lipped about what went on in Old Valyria.*Hasn’t thought about at all.
fuckin’ Kinja. let me delete shit. ah for the best, I’m in the greys anyway.
Can’t say I’m excited for this but I will probably give it a shot when it comes out.
Did we need more of this? We did not.Gimme that Naomi Watts series set 1,000,000 years ago, THAT would be way better. Also we’d get Naomi Watts in fuckin’ Game of Thrones.
Make a show about Dev Patel and Anya Taylor-Joy walking around Westeros. Make it a mockumentary, even.
Get Richard Ayoade to present it and I’m in.
Subject: Dragonfire. Dear Ser/Lady, I am writing to inform you of a dragon that […]
And she teaches all the dragons to play chess?
It’s also worth pointing out that the women-produced series with a woman as the lead character got dumped for another men-produced series with multiple men in leading roles. It’s almost as though Hollywood has a problem with gender parity!
While gender bias is a very real thing, I would point out that the stuff with the White Walkers is pretty freaking boring given what we saw happen in the final season of Game of Thrones. The Targaryen history laid out in Fire & Blood however, is fascinating and there are so many stories in it you could make decades of quality television out of it.
Smith’s first scene is filming on a beach…just like how his first 11th Doctor scene was on the beach from The Time of Angels.
If I had a nickel for every time that happened, I’d have two nickels, but it’s still weird that it happened twice.
I am really disappointed that Moses Hightower isn’t the family lord
The Lord of Making Funny Noises With His Mouth?
You’re confusing Hightower and Jones.
I know, dirtbag!
To be a massive pedant:Prince Daemon (not Deamon) is the uncle to Rhaenyra, not her brother.
Still gonna be incest.
AWWW JYEEAAAH
lol yep still gross af
Matt Smith is here to chew gum and fuck his sister, and he’s all out of gum.
Oh they’re actually making these.
a drag queen could have supplied a better wig for Matt Smith
Emilia Clarke’s was never that good either
I genuinely think this is going to get cancelled after 1 season. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but after the final season of GoT I just don’t think the public is interested.
What is dead may never die
The show is gonna have to be incredible to facilitate audience retention. If not it’s going to debut to huge numbers that trail off by the end of the first season. It’ll probably get an earlier renewal and then we’ll see budget cuts and scaling back a la Westworld.
All they need is are hooky first and finale episodes that get people talking and the series will do fine. People want good Game of Thrones material which is why so many stuck with it till the bitter end, hoping for good and not finding it.
Fire & Blood is an incredible diamond mine to get to use as source material. The many stories laid out in just the first volume that has been published, is so rich that HBO could easily getDECADES of shows out of it. We know the direction, casting and production level will be top notch given who is involved. I think this has the potential to be bigger than Game of Thrones. The backlash from Thrones will only serve to improve Fire & Blood. I am beyond excited for this show.
I’m not saying the potential isn’t there, but speaking to overall audience reaction. Anything less than stellar is just going to remind people of the end of the original series.
All series must serve. All series must die.
I think there’s a sufficiently devoted fan base for it to do fine. I’ve been truly shocked by how many acquaintances and Internet personalities have mentioned going back to re-watch the entire series during the pandemic. Doesn’t hurt that anyone who watches TV probably scratched a lot of past series off their list during 2020—although who knows, maybe we’ll all be reveling so much in the ability to go out and see people that we kill post-Peak TV once and for all.That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be canceled after one season—or that the people who are re-watching the original series aren’t making an objectively wrong choice in terms of how they use their time.
Nah, they need content for HBO Max. When was the last time they canceled anything prematurely?
The biggest mistake was making it a prequel. They were already pretty primitive to begin with. The wars are going to be magic dragons vs armies throwing rocks.
HBO is usually pretty generous when it comes to renewing shows, so it’ll probably last longer than one season even if it’s not a huge hit. Enlightened and Looking both got second seasons despite abysmal ratings. (Granted, neither of those shows cost anything near the budget of this show, so idk.)
Deamon Targaryen – “I wear a wig now; wigs are cool.”
Is this stuff covered in the books anywhere? I’ve read the Dunk & Egg stuff, as well as the extant Song of Ice & Fire series, but none of the comics, encyclopedias, or other assorted GRRM cruft.
I’m going to assume that it’s based on this.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_%26_Blood_(novel)Don’t hold me to it.
I didn’t know that existed…
Be warned, calling it a novel is inaccurate. It’s more like an in-world history.
It’s a pretty dry book. But there are a few neat sections. Unless you’re pretty invested in the Thrones world I’d say just check out a wiki for the broad strokes. Also, it’s only volume 1 of 2 of a history. As far as I know there Martin hasn’t started writing the second one yet.
So it’s the Simarillion for Game of Thrones. Hard pass.
In fairness he’s very busy not writing The Winds of Winter; he’ll get around to not writing the followup to Fire and Blood sometime after he’s finished not writing TWoW.
Brandon Sanderson will get to it right after he’s done making a coherent novel out of Martin’s notes for Winds of Winter, which I assume are three sentences scratched onto the back of a napkin, and not the 15,000 pages he assures us have already been written.
So basically expect the entire finale of Game of Thrones to be published less than a year after he dies, because Sanderson will need at least a month to write the last three books.
Yeah, it’s based on the first Dance of the Dragons. Fire and Blood goes into it but there’s also a short story called The Princess and the Queen that covers most of it.
Yes, it is covered in Fire & Blood (vol 1). I am planning on re-reading it before the show. Fire & Blood is an absolute diamond mine of stories about the Targs and other grand families in Westeros.
Prince Philip was already a living god, when he was, ya know, living.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
Trippy.
I hope Warwick Capper sues the fuck outta the production for stealing his branding:
Well I definitely didn’t expect to see this here
Good ol’ Matt Smith. Cheekbones for Britain!
At least he won’t need to get his eyebrows worked over for the series…..
1) I call Matt Smith “Foam Face”2) his character’s name is “Demon”? Srsly?
It’s pronounced Damon, which is a lot less awesome.
Damon, fighter of the Nytmon, in the all-Jamaican adaptation of the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia play?
Because GRRM bizarrely doesn’t know how an ash is pronounced.
(Hint: A few different ways but never as a long ‘a’)
Matt…Demon…!
If I’m not mistaken it’s spelled ‘Daemon’ anyways, pronounced ‘Damon’
a) the article spells it both ways
b) daemon means demon, even if there are fantasy-novel twists on it to make it a soul or a familiar
c) it’s a really dumb name, wasn’t there an Aemonn? That’s a better name.
Any of these are better than the Targaryen name ‘Aenys’…..which I can only imagine is pronounced ‘anus’ 🙁
Aynis, son of Bulox and Hoohah
Is anyone a tad let down by the costumes? As much as GOT: Original Recipe varied writing wise, they were always on point with the costume creations.
I was hoping for something visually different for a show that takes place 300 years before the source material.
Based on the costumes, it feels like the time period is only 30 years earlier.
The only look where I felt they did something interesting was with Alicent Hightower’s.
Ha, you and half the posts on Twitter I’ve seen. Hard agree, after seeing these pictures.
This looks like mediocre cosplay with marginally famous actors.
Came for the Matt Smith “lead with the forehead” look, was not disappointed. Maybe it’s because of how heavy his chin is?
He’s definitely got some kind of “albino xenomorph” thing going on. Or am I the only one seeing that?
I don’t recall a lot of buzz for the Targaryen history book this was apparently based on, which indicates to me that people are interested in the story being told in ASoIaF rather than the world of GoT. Even the Harry Potter spin-offs were less popular than the main books, which were in and of themselves much more popular than GoT. I feel like HBO is miscalculating that there are legions of diehards out there willing to lap up anything that says Westeros on it. But then again, a smaller, disproportionately loud fanbase got HBO Max to let Zack Snyder remake 75% of a movie, so crazier things have happened.
I’m up for it. Smith’s got the right cheekbones for a Targaryen. As a Doctor Who fan, I have mixed feelings, though, since, while I want him to be a success in all of his endeavors, I do feel like if he needed the work he’d record some Big Finish audios sooner.
Counterpoint: if more actors see that Doctor Who is a stepping stone to anything other than a lifetime of recording for Big Finish, Doctor Who will get better actors.
Who would want anything more than a lifetime of recording stories for Big Finish?
Nothing in Big Finish has topped Jubilee yet.
I mean, modern era doctors all went on to do some very high paying projects. The “lifetime of audios” cliché is, well, a cliché ^^
‘Blond hair and ebony eyebrows? She’s clearly one of us!’
It already looks hundred times better than Witcher.
Are we sure this is GoT?There’s only 5 characters pictured and that’s like 1/10th who you usually have to keep track of.“I’m lord Whats-His-Name from house Those Guys, season 1.”
It’s all fun and games until Martin announces an unwritten sequel to Fire & Blood to be released “eventually.”
Ridiculous and terrible casting for multiple reasons. But you wouldn’t know that from the sad twister playing cowards that lurk in this comment section. Don’t expect my comments to go through.
If this show doesn’t include the dragon named “Sheepstealer” I’m not watching it.
looked better on Henry Cavill
I fell victim to the chatter around the “10th anniversary” and just re-watched G0T for I think the 3rd time and remembered just how let down I was by the end. I am still intrigued enough as a non-book reader that I will watch this new incarnation but I am not the slightest bit excited, which bums me out.
Ugh, totally forgot this bullshit was actually happening.
Bleh.
300 years in the past, eh? So right around the time of the Enlightenment then?
Meh, when are we finally getting Wild Cards and are they giving that the budget it needs to be great?
Yeah, wildcards could be really cool. You would think it would be an easy pitch with the ongoing superhero boom. The anthology nature would lend itself to easy production scheduling and rotating of cast as well.
Is anyone besides Tormented Thoughts excited for this?
hmm feels empty already. why is everyone so clean? looks like some shitty network show.
I’ll be interested to see how all the incest works on this one. Yes, GoT had Jamie & Cersei and Jon & Dany, but it always had an undertone of incest is bad and all these people are super messed up. But it gets a lot more incestuous in this period of time. If you’re not rooting for at least some of them, it’s not going to be an enjoyable watch.
why are they going back so far? 300 years? 10,000 years? Who cares? We just want to see all the shit that set up the game of thrones we know-show jaimie killing the crazy targayen-etc. Go back like 40 years, maybe, tops.
It is purely my opinion, but Matt Smith looks like a guy wearing a poorly-fitting Matt Smith mask.