Warning: this article contains major spoilers from Dragon House season 2 premiere, “A Son for a Son.”
For over a year, actors Sam C. Wilson and Mark Stobbart couldn’t tell anyone they’d landed a role in Dragon House season 2. It was intentional. Their characters, Blood and Cheese, are involved in one of the most tragic events to happen to a character in the world of Game Of Thrones, the assassination and beheading of 6-year-old Prince Jaehaerys Targaryen. Series co-creator Ryan Condal wanted to preserve as much of the couple’s introduction as possible.
“We spent a lot of time choosing these guys, but we didn’t want to make it too much of a ‘here’s this twisty thing from the books’ and make it seem like a gimmick,” Condal said. Weekly Entertainment. “It was definitely us trying to protect that moment. Everyone knows it’s coming. People are waiting for you to play the hits. Sometimes you have to do a little bit of misdirection to get it revealed in a good way. ”
This particular hit comes in the season 2 premiere, the title of which is derived from a well-known phrase from the George RR Martin film. fire and blood: “Make him a son for a son.” Grief-ridden, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) declares before her war council: “I want Aemond Targaryen”, her half-brother (played by Ewan Mitchell) and responsible for the loss of her son, Lucerys Velaryon (Elliot Grihault). Rhaenyra’s husband and uncle, Prince Daemon (Matt Smith), interprets this in his typically Daemon way (perhaps intentionally) and hires two sellswords to exact revenge from the queen.
Courtesy of Ollie Upton/HBO
One of them is a member of the Gold Cloaks with a disdain for the Hightowers and loyalty to Daemon. He will be known throughout the ages as Blood. (The book originally described the character as a former Gold Cloak.)
“When I got there, the director (Alan Taylor) alluded to, ‘You’re the guy with the voice,'” said Wilson, an actor in the Amazon film. Hannah and CBBC Dodger who indeed has a voice comparable to that of his character, tells EW during a Zoom conversation with Stobbart. “Yes, it’s that deep, but I went a little deeper for Blood. I think he had to look totally terrifying for it to make sense as to what he ends up doing, which is not good.”
The other is a rat catcher with gambling debts who works at the Red Keep. History will remember him as Cheese. There is technically a third member of this group: Cheese’s dog. Wilson and Stobbart laugh that the canine actor is more famous than them, since he’s the same dog who played the role of the lead puppy in Disney. Cruel. (“We were nothing compared to that dog,” Stobbart jokes.) Not much is known about these characters in fire and blood. Martin writes: “Their real names are lost to history. » But with Condal’s writing and the actors’ performances, they have become figures in their own right in the lexicon of history. Game Of Thrones.
“It came from a director I had worked for before,” Stobbart recalls of the audition. “I had no idea who it could be. I didn’t know the world. There was a name. Sam, do you remember what those names were?” Wilson begins typing into the search bar of his email inbox to find the answer. “It was Charlie!” Stobbart continues. “It was Borris and Charlie instead of Blood and Cheese.”
These aren’t the only tactics used to keep these characters secret. The sides the actors used for the audition had different dialogue. Instead of “go kill” a royal prince, it said “go kidnap.” Instead of the “Queen’s quarters”, the scene took place in “the Prince’s quarters”. Wilson ended up screwing up the lines when he finally got on set and saw the actual scripts: “I realized I was saying the lines the way I learned them in the audition.”
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Stobbart also remembers the job requiring “decent comedy bits,” although Wilson says, “that disappeared pretty quickly.” It really developed over the course of filming with the things we were talking about with Alan, with Ryan. I remember auditioning for this with more of a spark than what ended up being on screen. From the evidence I’ve seen, it’s much darker than the job we agreed to.
Courtesy of Ollie Upton/HBO
Blood and Cheese have their orders: sneak into the castle disguised as rat catchers and kill Aemond. Although it doesn’t happen on camera, it’s clear that Daemon is giving them a stipulation: if the one-eyed prince remains at large, they should kill “a son” instead. And since, of course, Aemond is not there, the assassins randomly find themselves in the nursery where the royal twins, Prince Jaehaerys and Princess Jaehaera, are sleeping. Cheese holds their mother, Queen Helaena (Phia Saban), at knifepoint and threatens to kill them all if she doesn’t name the male heir.
The events are much more horrible in fire and blood. The way Martin wrote it, the Dowager Queen Alicent Hightower (played by Olivia Cooke in Dragon House) is present and there are three children of Helaena instead of two, all awake and obliged to testify. The blood kills the servant and the guard; Cheese rapes Jaehaera when the queen takes too long to choose which of her children to kill; and when Helaena finally succumbs and chooses her youngest, 2-year-old Maelor, Blood decapitates Jaehaerys instead, letting Maelor know that his mother wanted him dead.
There are several factors as to why the show doesn’t strictly adapt the scene this way. For one thing, the series takes place on a slightly different timeline than the book, meaning Maelor hasn’t been born yet and the other two are even younger than the book. fire and blood depicted. “Maelor does not yet exist on this timeline because 30 years are compressed into 20 years,” Condal explains.
Courtesy of Ollie Upton/HBO
Other challenges came from the logistics of using child actors. “We knew we would have a hard time getting performances from kids that young — as someone with kids that age, I know all of this intimately,” Condal said. “Then there are things that you can and cannot expose children to on a film set. If you were to try to faithfully replicate this story, you would be challenged from every angle to get a performance of a child . A lot of times it seems like the child is going through this, but you’re using clever cutaways and insertions.
When Blood covers Jaehaerys’ mouth in the episode, for example, it’s actually the child’s father wearing the glove, not Wilson. Death itself then occurs off camera; Blood splatters and sawing sound effects accompany Helaena as she flees the room with her daughter. “We were standing around a bed with a doll,” Stobbart says. “Watching it is more shocking than you could imagine, but in the grand scheme of filming it, it was like any other job.”
Given the practical obstacles in their path, Condal went back to the basic elements of what needed to be accomplished: Rhaenyra wants revenge, Daemon goes out to make it happen, but the book is unclear as to what Rhaenyra specifically asked for and what Daemon asked. » he asked. “What we wanted to do was create a visceral sequence that satisfies the pacing of the book, but also takes place in a reality that works for our television audience, many of whom would not have read the book,” says Condal . “We wanted it to feel a bit like a dark Cohen Brothers heist sequence that takes a terrible turn at the end.”
Courtesy of Ollie Upton/HBO
“It was always about losing control and finding ourselves in a position where we had no choice but to do what we set out to do because there was no escape” , notes Wilson. “It ends up being a crime of incompetence in the show, and I think that’s where it differentiates itself from the book. It ends up being two totally incompetent hitmen.”
Although their roles are relatively small, Wilson and Stobbart consider their place in the larger story of Game Of Thrones, adding Blood and Cheese to the list of tragedies like the Red Wedding and the burning of Shireen. “Being a part of it, you just hope it lands for the people that matter,” Wilson points out.
“People are going to have a very clear idea of who Blood and Cheese are,” Stobbart adds. “I want people to look at him and say, ‘That’s who I saw when I read the book.’ For me, it will be a really good job.”
New episodes of Dragon House airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO.