House of the Dragon’s Emmy D’Arcy stars as Tommy in short film The Talent
By Dan Selcke
Emma D’Arcy stars as Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel show. Pretty much immediately after they made their debut as Rhaenyra, they were a hit, getting nominated for awards and put on lists of change-makers in the industry.
We won’t see D’Arcy return as Rhaenyra for a while, but in the meantime they’re busy with other projects. According to Deadline, they teamed up with director Thomas May Bailey on a short film called The Talent, which takes place on the set of a glitzy car commercial. D’Arcy plays a production assistant named Tommy who takes life advice from the big-name actor starring in the commercial.
“I was really excited to play Tommy,” D’Arcy told Deadline in a written statement (they didn’t give a normal interview in owing to the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes). ”He’s a beautifully sympathetic character, striving, fumbling, deeply self-conscious, constantly misstepping. And the size of his internal journey is sort of at odds with his environment,”
"What is another working day for everyone else on the film marks a defining psychic event for Tommy. I think that’s the basis for a lot of the film’s humor: the sheer size of this young assistant’s feeling comes to eclipse everything around him."
D’Arcy thinks the film, which runs about 15 minutes long, offers a nuanced picture of life on a set “with its hierarchies and bizarre formalities, all of which you’re somehow supposed to know but no one teaches you.”
Emma D’Arcy will return as Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon season 2
Work on The Talent ended just the other month. Since then, the film has been nominated in the Best British category at the Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival.
Hopefully projects like this continue to raise D’Arcy’s profile and draw attention to their work. And then, sometime in 2024, they will return as Rhaenyra Targaryen in the second season of House of the Dragon.
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