House of the Dragon is officially a hit for HBO. There was a lot of pressure on the network’s new Game of Thrones prequel series; after all, how do you follow up the biggest show in the world? In the case of House of the Dragon, the answer is to do something similar, but also very different.
While Game of Thrones sprawled out over the imagined continents of Westeros and Essos, House of the Dragon tells a story that sprawls out through multiple generations of the Targaryen family. The show’s sixth episode, “The Princess and the Queen,” featured a 10-year time jump that saw several of its most prominent characters recast with older actors, including leads Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower. As teenagers, they were played by Milly Alcock and Emily Carey respectively; as adults, Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke will take over.
The buzz surrounding Episode 6 has been pretty good, with many praising the writing and the performances from D’Arcy and Cooke in particular. They had a tall order to fill, as many fans had already been captivated by the performances of their younger counterparts. This has inevitably led to the question: could Milly Alcock and Emily Carey someday return as younger versions of Rhaenyra and Alicent?
House of the Dragon showrunner isn’t “closing the door” on Alcock and Carey’s return
Earlier this month, Emily Carey said that “conversations” had happened behind the scenes regarding whether she and Milly Alcock might reprise their roles as Alicent and Rhaenyra. Showrunner Ryan Condal gave his take to Variety. “I mean, look, I don’t know,” he said, helpfully.
Condal emphasizes that his team is deep into writing season 2, and have already figured out many of its most important beats. As things stand, Carey and Alcock’s younger versions of Alicent and Rhaenyra “are not a part of the story that we’re telling, yet. That’s not a thing that we’re doing right now.”
However, Condal also said that House of the Dragon can be “a little bit more fancy” than Game of Thrones, narratively speaking. Thrones rarely ever had flashbacks, give or take young Cersei’s visit to Maggy the Frog or Bran’s greensight visions. House of the Dragon has frequently used time jumps, so it’s much easier to imagine including something like a flashback to Carey and Alcock’s version of the characters.
“There are things that we haven’t fully sorted out,” Condal said. “I’m not closing the door on anything. So there, how’s that for an answer?”
Whether we ever see Milly Alcock and Emily Carey again in House of the Dragon, there will be plenty of other Targaryens to fall in love with or despise in the coming weeks. “The Princess and the Queen” introduced a slew of new characters, and in a couple more episodes, many of them will also be aged up to adults.
House of the Dragon team “stressed over” nailing the time jump transition
As for how to handle the transition from the younger actors to the older, that was something that had Condal and the rest of the team understandably nervous. Investing in one set of actors only to swap them out halfway through a season is a big risk.
“We wanted them to look similar enough that it wasn’t one of these tropes where you’re just meant to believe that that’s the same person,” Condal explained. “But ultimately, we needed great actors. It was definitely a process. As great as Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke are, they were not the people that were going to begin the story. It was definitely a thing that we stressed over a lot. I think we succeeded. All four of them brought a tremendous performance to the show. I’m really proud of all of them.”
A huge part of what made the 10-year time jump work so well is the writing. From the first harrowing moments of Rhaenyra giving birth to its final montage, Episode 6 of House of the Dragon rarely let up. According to Condal, the choice to begin the episode with Rhaenyra’s labors was intentionally meant to reference her trauma over what happened to her mother, Aemma Arryn, who died from a forced C-section procedure in the show’s premiere.
“That was conceived very early on in the writers’ room,” Condal said. “The death of her mother in the pilot is the real underlying psychological reason Rhaenyra does not want to get married, because she’s terrified of going the way that her mother did. To drop in on her giving birth — knowing that the last birth the audience has seen has gone terribly wrong — was an incredibly tense and visceral way to begin the story, to get you in with Rhaenyra, to make you hopefully connect with her and care about her, and also to communicate that a ton of time and story distance has passed since the last time we saw her.”
Deciding where exactly to place the time jump in the season was another hurdle that the writing team had to overcome. “Those things happen, I think, organically over the storytelling process,” Condal said. “The moment with the green dress at the pre-wedding ceremony was the dividing line between Rhaenyra and Alicent. Rhaenyra lied and got Alicent’s dad fired. Alicent backed her and vouched for her to the king, and it blew up in her face. She’s played the role of the good servant all the way along. This is her coming out, saying, ‘I am House Hightower, and I now stand for myself.’ So we knew that’s where we wanted to end it.”
"Then jumping forward to this new time period felt like the right thing to do. A lot of the storytelling that happens in 6 — which is done brilliantly by Sara Hess, who wrote the script, and Miguel, who directed it — is being told in the things that you’re not seeing happen and the characters who are now there and the characters who are missing. All of these things imply the passage of time, and I think a smart audience who is leaning forward and paying attention will pick up on those things and understand quite a bit has changed since last we left these characters."
House of the Dragon premieres new episodes Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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