Matt Smith confirms he’ll ride Caraxes in House of the Dragon season 1

House of the Dragon draws ever closer, and the tantalizing teases grow ever more frequent. HBO’s first successor show to Game of Thrones is just over three months away, which means the floodgates are starting to open.

Just last week we got a brand new trailer that gave us our first real glimpse of some of the dragons that will be flying around Westeros. House of the Dragon is set roughly 200 years before Game of Thrones, when House Targaryen is at the height of their power and had dragons aplenty; lots of dragons.

One character who will be doing their fair share of dragonriding is Daemon Targaryen, played by Matt Smith. Ambitious, deadly and charismatic, Daemon is the wildcard of the Targaryen family. He rides Caraxes, one of the oldest dragons living during time period. Nicknamed the Blood Wyrm for its red scales and ferocity, Caraxes is every bit his rider’s match.

Smith recently appeared at the Paris Pan Festival where he reflected on the various roles he’s played throughout his career, such as Prince Phillip on The Crown and the 11th Doctor on Doctor Who. He also spoke briefly about what it was like to ride Caraxes, which is our first official confirmation that we’ll see Daemon take to the air on dragonback during House of the Dragon season 1. We’d kind of assumed this, but we couldn’t be 100% sure until now.

Daemon Targaryen will fly the dragon Caraxes in HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel

Obviously, Smith couldn’t talk too much about House of the Dragon, but he was happy to give fans a glimpse into the dragonriding process. “Well without giving too much away, yeah it’s fun to fake fly. I mean, who says it’s fake, you know maybe it’s not,” the actor said with a laugh. “We had a great time fake flying and I’ve grown very fond of Caraxes I must say, in all his grumpiness.”

"They build an actual big sort of…it’s like kind of a simulator almost, you know what I mean? And you’re on and it’s like a great big pretend dragon. And you’re about 10 feet high, and you’re up there and they’ve got loads of wind that they’re flying at you. It’s about as close to flying a dragon as you can get, really. So it was good fun."

We’ve seen that dragon simulator before, back when Daenerys and Jon Snow took to the skies on Drogon and Rhaegal. It’s not known whether House of the Dragon has made any improvements to the greenscreen dragon mount over the original series, but with how much focus there will be on dragons, the show may have further refined the process. With Miguel Sapochnik, the director behind dragon heavy episodes of Game of Thrones like “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Bells,” serving as one of the showrunners on House of the Dragon, you can bet that the producers know what they’re doing.

House of the Dragon premieres on HBO and HBO Max on August 21.

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