The bells will soon toll over King’s Landing to announce the death of King Viserys I Targaryen. While House of the Dragon has been a resounding success for HBO, and Sunday’s episode “The Lord of the Tides” was easily the standouts of the show’s first season so far. The main event was the final day of King Viserys, played by Paddy Considine. After suffering from a kind of leprosy for more than 20 years, Viserys finally succumbed to the disease and old age, but not before sitting the Iron Throne one final time and beseeching his splintered family to make peace.
Viserys was a tragic character and Considine played him to the utmost; even Fire & Blood author George R.R. Martin has said that he enjoys Considine’s take on the character more than the version of Viserys from his book. I’ll be saying this often and loudly for the next few weeks, but if Considine doesn’t win an Emmy for his performance, there is no justice in the world.
Despite being the focus of some of the most haunting scenes in House of the Dragon to date, however, Considine says he hasn’t seen “The Lord of the Tides.”
“No, I haven’t, and I’m not sure if I ever will,” Considine told The New York Times. “I haven’t seen anything beyond Episode 2, really. Some people don’t like to watch themselves, and I’m one of those people. It’s debilitating. I tend to just stay away. I’m sure somebody will show me a photograph.”
The extent of King Viserys’ deterioration was a closely guarded secret on set
Of all the characters on House of the Dragon, King Viserys underwent the most profound physical transformation. He began the season as a hale and relatively healthy man, and ended it so ill that he spent his days bedridden and drugged up on milk of the poppy. The disease that plagued him since the series premiere grew worse to the point where he lost an eye and there was a hole through his cheek that revealed the muscle and teeth beneath.
House of the Dragon was not filmed linearly, meaning that some of the very first scenes Considine shot were those when Viserys was older, though not quite at the very end of his life. Think Episode 6 and 7, where he was old but still able to hobble around. Even then, the extent of Viserys’ deterioration was a closely guarded secret; security guards followed Considine around with umbrellas to hide him from view, and the show’s marketing stuck primarily to images of Viserys as a younger man.
“Very early on, you’re still forming the character, and I knew it was going to come to an end with some kind of transformation, so you’re always looking for references for that,” Considine said. “I happened to be watching a documentary about one of my favorite artists, Richard Hambleton , and watching his physical decline through cancer, addiction and scoliosis. I said to Miguel Sapochnik, ‘This would be a good idea for where Viserys ends up.’ So I had somewhere in my head that I could map where I was going to get to.”
Despite having an idea of how illness would wreck Viserys’ body, Considine says that not even he knew quite how bad it would get. The decision to really go all out in “The Lord of the Tides” was made organically while the show was filming. “The extremity — Viserys looking so emaciated, how it’s so cancerous, this thing, that it eats into his face — that decision was made more than halfway into the shoot. So it went probably more extreme than I had originally imagined it would go,” Considine said.
"I watched my dad die of cancer, and it was a very rapid demise. So it certainly made sense to me, and I think it was pretty shocking and effective. It becomes a physical manifestation of all the infighting and skulduggery, really. The mystery is why so many people crave the Iron Throne. It’s not something Viserys craved; he just had a sense of duty. He knows the weight of being king, the weight of the responsibility, and the toll it can take.From the minute of his wife’s funeral, I think Viserys starts to die. It’s a slow death. Nowhere in the story does Viserys ask the maesters to cure him, to stop this thing from eating him alive. I think he accepts it as part of the guilt of the decision he makes to put his wife through a terrible, horrible procedure. It’s like people who surrender to illness. When they offer suggestions to cure him, he doesn’t bother with it. He lets it consume him. He surrenders. That was my thing for him, anyway."
Viserys gave up on his children with Alicent
Considine also discussed King Viserys’ strained relationship with his children from his marriage to Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke). Despite having four children with her, Viserys very clearly favors his one surviving child from his first marriage, Rhaenyra. He even goes so far as to call her his “only child” in his delirium during Episode 8. It’s not too surprising that there’s a lot of resentment from characters like Aegon and Aemond considering how little Viserys seemed to care about them.
“He gives up on them,” Considine said. “He’s so protective of Rhaenyra, and he’s no fool — he knows that her are not Laenor Velaryon’s children. He’s just at a certain point in his life, with his new family, that he doesn’t take much of an interest in his other children. And the kids even sussed that out, you know, the actors playing the kids. They said they thought I hated them! I was like, ‘Where have you had that from? I don’t hate you.’ They meant Viserys, not Paddy.”
"I certainly didn’t hate them, but I just had no time for them. That happens in families, doesn’t it? He’s there, but not there. Rhaenyra, she’s the link to Aemma, and as far as he’s concerned, she’s his only child."
Viserys’ was thinking of Aemma in his final moments
Ultimately, King Viserys is a character who will be defined more by his failures than his successes. He was a father who wanted to do right by all the people in his very complicated family. But he was also a lax king who allowed a peaceful realm to slip toward war.
No matter what comes next, Viserys’ last moments where he lies alone in bed, shakily reaching for something unseen just above him, will remain powerful. It might come as a surprise that Considine had quite a lot of freedom to sculpt those moments based on his own understanding of the character, and that his final line of the show was unscripted.
“The only suggestion is that he doesn’t quite know who he’s talking to,” Considine revealed. “I always had an idea in my head, whether it was useful to the story or not, that the last thing Viserys sees before he dies is the person who comes to collect him from this mortal life. When he dies, he sees Aemma, and he says, ‘My love.'”
"I just kind of improvised that line, and reached out a little bit, because this to me is a tragic love story, in many ways. But I kept that private; I never actually disclosed that in the end. I just thought, “If they use it, they use it,” and I hear it’s made the cut, so I’m really grateful, because it ends that story quite beautifully. The narrative I had in my mind was that he never really gets over Aemma, that he’s devastated for the rest of his life."
Given the power of his performance, and the fact that so many fans have clamored to see younger Rhaenyra and Alicent actors Milly Alcock and Emily Carey return at some point, is it possible we’ll one day see Paddy Considine as King Viserys again, perhaps in flashback?
“I love him so much. I think he’s my favorite character I’ve ever played. But I would struggle with that,” said Considine. “His story has been told. He made his impact. He was the peaceful king that everybody thought was a bore, and he brought some love and compassion to the show. I don’t know what more you could do with that. So I think this is the end.”
We shall never see his like again. House of the Dragon premieres new episodes Sundays on HBO and HBO Max.
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