See Naomi Watts up close and in costume on cancelled Game of Thrones prequel

HBO is currently hard at work shooting (and promoting) House of the Dragon, its follow-up to Game of Thrones. Set over 100 years before the original show, the series will be full of familiar themes, including dragons, Targaryens and different factions fighting over the Iron Throne.

But before House of the Dragon, there was another Game of Thrones show in production: Blood Moon, which was to be set well over one thousand years before the mother series. There is no Iron Throne. There are no dragons. Westeros is a very different place.

Unfortunately, HBO pulled the plug on Blood Moon after showrunner Jane Goldman and her team made a pilot, but we’re still getting little bits and pieces of what we missed here and there. For instance, a crew member named Tom Canton recently posted an image of cast member Naomi Watts in full costume working on the show in a beautiful grotto in Gaeta, Italty, where the show was filming back in 2019:

We’d seen Watts’ costume before, but never this close. With the gold coloring, I wonder if she was playing an ancient Lannister…or rather a Casterly, the family who occupied Casterly Rock before Lan the Clever winkled them out of it. That’s how far back this prequel went.

What was the cancelled Game of Thrones prequel about?

We never learned the name Watts’ character, but we knew she was “a charismatic socialite with a dark secret.” The show had a full ensemble cast that included Josh Whitehouse, Naomi Ackie, Jamie Campbell Bower, Denise Gough and many more. Characters included Ianthe (Rosy McEwen), Reynard (Sean Rigby), Robben (Richard McCabe), Maiev (Dixie Egerickx), Sorcha (Georgina Campbell) and Flavia (Georgina Beedle). Leah Gayer and Mhairi Gayer would have played twin sisters Caera and Vera while Amy McPherson played Aurelia, Watts’ character’s daughter.

We also know that the Children of the Forest would have played a big role. How would all of these characters interacted with each other? According to YouTuber Lucifer means Lightbringer, the show would have been about a marriage alliance between the Starks of Winterfell and the Casterlys of Casterly Rock. At one point, a “blood moon” would precipitate a rain of meteors onto Westeros. And in that darkness, the White Walkers would come for the first time…

Is that accurate? We’ll probably never know, although if you’re reading this, HBO, I would 100% buy the pilot on Blu-ray, just saying.

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