Star of cancelled Game of Thrones prequel speaks out

At the moment, HBO is hard at work on House of the Dragon, a prequel to Game of Thrones that will explore what Westeros was like over 100 years before the start of the original show, when the Targaryens were at the height of their power and riding dragons through the skies.

But that wasn’t the first prequel idea HBO tried. Before that, the network actually filmed a pilot for Blood Moon, a show that would have been set thousands of years in the past, long before the Targaryens even came to Westeros. The show had an impressive cast, including Naomi Watts and Josh Whitehouse.

We still don’t know why the show didn’t go forward, but Too Fab caught up with Whitehouse, who was among the first people to be cast, to talk his experience. “It was mind blowing, just such an honor to even be considered for something like that,” Whitehouse said. “I got the audition, I got the job and then I spent a year and a half waiting for it to actually happen, pre-prod stuff. Then it ended up getting canceled and I was like, ‘Oh, alright.’ I was just honored to be involved, even to be able to say that is a huge thing for my career, it was such a big show.”

As it ends up, Whitehouse never even got to shoot anything for the show — his character, whoever it was, wouldn’t have shown up until the second episode, and they never shot anything beyond the pilot. “[Sometimes] things don’t happen for a reason,” Whitehouse said, putting a positive spin on the show not going forward. “In a sense, like, Game of Thrones was such a huge thing already, it’s kind of nice to not have that pressure, the potential to not live up to expectations and bring something new to the world. But either way I would have been happy.”

Whitehouse is doing alright either way. He recently appeared as a lead in the ’80s jukebox musical Valley Girl, which would have been out in theaters about now but is being released on video-on-demand thanks to the coronavirus. Still, it’s hard not to wonder what he and the rest of the cast might have done with Blood Moon (also possibly called The Long Night — that’s another thing we don’t know about it). Until HBO releases the pilot as a special feature or something, we’ll just have to look forward to the prequel they currently have in production:

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