Matt Smith felt more pressure with Doctor Who than House of the Dragon

Matt Smith has been part of his fair share of major TV shows. Not long ago he was playing a young Prince Phillip in The Crown on Netflix. Before that he was the Eleventh Doctor on Doctor Who. Surely that role prepared him for the international fame that comes with playing Daemon Targaryen on House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel show?

“[T]he pressure that came with Doctor Who is extraordinary,” Smith told the Los Angeles Times. “On this, you’re sharing it with like 10 other actors. Doctor Who is ‘Doctor Who,’ Hamlet is ‘Hamlet,’ you know? I was 26 [when I was cast] and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel pressure like that again. In Britain, anyway, the focus on that job is enormous. [House of the Dragon] is a huge global franchise, or so they tell me, but I just go to work in a studio in Watford and try to get the lines in the right order. I think that everyone who leaves Doctor Who will forever miss Doctor Who, because it doesn’t get any better. He is the most glorious character. To live with the idea of being able to time travel is f— amazing. It’s limitless. It’s a tough part to leave.”

It does indeed sound like, for Smith, House of the Dragon is no big deal after doing Doctor Who, which launched him into the limelight at a young age. He seems to enjoy playing Daemon Targaryen, mercurial and violent though he can be. “I think he’s just an agent of chaos in many respects,” he said. “I was trying not to be too black and white about him.”

Matt Smith: You “have to take the modern-day morality away” when playing Daemon Targaryen

That can be tough to do when your character is doing stuff like trying to seduce their own niece. But Smith approaches it in a matter-of-fact way. “[Y]ou have to take the modern-day morality away,” he said. “It’s a different time. It’s a story, and the story requires that these two characters do that. So you do it. But I think we were lucky with Clare Kilner, the director [of ‘King of the Narrow Sea,’ the episode in which Daemon attempts to seduce young Rhaenyra]. She handled the sex scenes as well as I’ve seen them handled. Some people, I imagine, would watch it and they want more. And some people think, ‘This is too much.’ But I don’t really get involved in all that. That’s up to the director to manage.”

"We have a really good intimacy coordinator. And me and [Milly Alcock, who played young Rhaenyra] got on fabulously well and just laughed our way through that scene. It looks really serious, but me and Milly are just pissing our pants the whole time, laughing, going, “There’s all these naked people standing here. What are we doing?” You try and cut through the really weird tension of the room and make jokes."

You hear that a lot from Smith in the interview: that after he plays the scenes, he kind of relinquishes control of Daemon to the world. “You just do it and let other people decipher it. It’s about giving over to the audience and letting them pick what it is. We’re just the vehicles. You can’t really have too much of an opinion on someone like Daemon because otherwise you’d never represent him with an even hand, because he does so much bad.”

Matt Smith thinks fans were “quite hard” on the ending of Game of Thrones

At the same time, Smith does think that Daemon has some kind of moral compass, even if it’s only clear to himself. “I think he has a sense of duty to his family, weirdly. I think he’d lie on his sword for his brother or Rhaenyra. He’s got a weird moral compass — perverse and strange, but nevertheless, there is a set of laws that he’s guided by. Where he feels alive is in that lane of chaos and anxiety and madness. He lives on a knife’s edge, all the time.”

If all goes well, Smith could be playing this role for quite some time. This first season only covers the opening portions of the the Targaryen civil war known as the Dance of the Dragons. Time will tell if the show will develop the same reputation for quality that Game of Thrones had…or the one for a poor ending, something Smith thinks is overblown.

“I thought [viewers] were quite hard on them,” Smith said. “It’s very hard to tie up any story. I think the body of work that all the actors and filmmakers produced is undeniably fantastic. The ending didn’t bother me. And I thought [House of the Dragon] was its own beast. You can’t pay too much attention to that stuff.”

Finally, Smith asked the most important question about Daemon: how has he managed to look basically the same age despite 20 or so years having passed over the course of the first season? “He’s always eating his greens. Gets lots of sleep. And doesn’t give a flying f—.”

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