House of the Dragon director breaks down Episode 8

The latest episode of House of the Dragon, “The Lord of the Tides,” was a huge one for King Viserys Targaryen. He died, after all. But what about the people he’s leaving behind, particularly his daughter Rhaenyra and his wife Alicent Hightower?

These two have been at loggerheads for a while now, although they almost — so close — arrived at a reconciliation in Episode 8. “One of the objectives of this episode was to get inside Rhaenyra and Alicent’s heads,” director Geeta Patel told Entertainment Weekly. “You have these two people who are at odds. And particularly Alicent, [we] wanted to feel her vulnerability and just understand both of them. So it’s almost like you’ve got two people you love and yet they hate each other. That’s closer to reality and something we all relate to.”

If you remember, in the episode before this one, Alicent came at Rhaenyra with a knife, so Patel had to do a lot of heavy lifting for us to buy into their friendship again. “Coming into the episode, I disliked Alicent,” the director said. “[B]ut in our episode it was really important that Alicent and Rhaenyra, that tension, that friendship was believable. And yet if you look at the actual words they don’t say to each other, ‘I miss you.’ They don’t say to each other, ‘I’m lonely.’ They don’t say these things. Finding those moments were really important to [showrunners Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik] and myself in letting everything be the subtext.”

House of the Dragon director didn’t want Alicent to come off as “a snake”

Episode 8 picked after another time jump, and Alicent had indeed seemed to cool off a bit in the intervening years. Early on in the episode, we see her talking to a serving girl who just got sexually assaulted by Alicent’s son Aegon, her chosen heir to the throne. It’s a complex scene, and Alicent doesn’t do the right thing — she pays the girl to keep quiet about the incident rather than exposing her son as the lout he is — but you at least get the idea that she hates doing it.

“When you read that scene and you’ve been through all the episodes right before, it’s easy to just be like, ‘Alicent is a cold-hearted snake,'” Patel said. “We talked about it before, we were like, ‘We can’t let that happen. We have to feel Alicent.’ So we, of course, had a way of shooting it and really feeling what Alicent might be going through.”

"The idea was to make it a day in the life for her. You’re going through the hallways, you’re going meeting to meeting to meeting. You feel this “working mom” feeling and that she’s not always perfect and she doesn’t always get it right and she doesn’t have all the choices in the world. She almost has to choose between worst-case scenarios. It’s interesting how when we got to that scene, I was still concerned. I thought, “God, she cannot come across as a snake,” And yet, what is she doing right now? Well, she’s paying off this girl to be quiet about being raped. Olivia just blew it out of the water. She just was Alicent in the most vulnerable, powerful, dimensional, emotional way. We had such a great time shooting that scene."

That scene also made good on something that producer Sara Hess said previously: that while House of the Dragon would include sexual assault, it wouldn’t depict the incidents onscreen. “We wanted the realism to be present in all of these scenes — meaning, yes, being raped or being hurt sexually is a serious thing,” Patel said. “And then there’s the complication of the way society works during these times. Is it something that someone would call the police and to make a big deal out of, or is it something that just happened all the time? And going into that gray area, too, is quite interesting. So there was a lot of conversation, particularly around this scene and this part of the story.”

Ewan Mitchell (Aemond Targaryen) isn’t that creepy in real life

Patel was also the first director who got to work with the actors playing Alicent’s children as adults: Tom Glynn-Carney as Aegon Targaryen and Ewan Mitchell as his one-eyed younger brother Aemond. “Ewan was so creepy and gave me chills, and yet when he is off camera, he’s the sweetest person you’ve ever met,” Patel said. “Every time you finish a take, he’ll say, ‘Do you want me to do it better? I can do it better. What do you want me to do?’ He’s just one of those people who works so hard and it just cracks me up because as soon as the camera’s on, he’s this other person. I think he did a really good job finding who he was and giving that person nuance and discovery. So I’m very proud of him.”

Aegon comes off worse than anyone in this episode, but Patel found some sympathy for him too. “[Aegon] is this lonely child who is disliked by everyone, misunderstood, and he found a way to make us love him and feel for him,” she said. “And that moment where Alicent walks away from him, he’s naked in bed. I don’t know about anybody else, but I felt the child in him. Even at the table later when he’s sitting there with Paddy, we made a point again in this episode, we wanted to be with everyone. So we found him alone and focused on his moments, and if you just put the camera on Tom, there’s always something interesting happening. The trick is, as directors and teams of director of photography, making the time to be able to get all of these moments where you’re filming something so big. And thank goodness we were able to.”

I think Patel did a terrific job directing “The Lord of the Tides” and hope she comes back for future seasons. In the meantime, the final two episodes of House of the Dragon will air Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.

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