As Game of Thrones neared its end, HBO took an unprecedented step: it started developing a series of spinoff shows. HBO had never made a direct spinoff before, but Game of Thrones was too big a success to ignore. Eventually, we know that they created a prequel series called House of the Dragon, which will air its second season this year. But before that, they shot a pilot for an entirely different kind of prequel show, codenamed Blood Moon.
While House of the Dragon is set over one hundred years before the events of Game of Thrones, Blood Moon would have taken place thousands of years before the likes of Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen and Tyrion Lannister were born. To this day, we don't know exactly what it was about, although we have clues. We know it had a large ensemble cast, though, including Miranda Richardson, Denise Gough, Jamie Campbell Bower (who went on to play Vecna on Stranger Things), Shiela Atim, Toby Regbo, and Naomi Watts, who would have played “a charismatic socialite with a dark secret.”
Details remain elusive, but reports have it that Watts may have played a member of the Casterly family, the people who occupied Casterly Rock before the Lannisters tricked them out of it, and that the pilot would have revolved around a marriage between a Castlery girl and a Stark boy. What exactly would have happened after that, we'll never know.
Still, a whole pilot was shot and scrapped; there are still pictures of Watts and company in full costume on set floating around the internet. In fact, a bunch of new ones just got uploaded. Hair and makeup designer Flora Moody posted a video of images from the set to her Instagram page. "This was an unaired Game of Thrones Prequel that I shot 4 years ago with the wonderful @naomiwatts," she wrote.
Mostly, Moody is showing off her excellent work on Watts' hair and makeup. But for us Game of Thrones fans, these pictures — which you can also see here — give us an invaluable look at what Blood Moon was going to be like. Watts' character in wearing an elaborate golden gown, looking very much like a proto-Lannister. She's standing in a spacious stone room with a beautiful carving on the wall. It's not hard to imagine that this is what the inside of Casterly Rock looks like. We barely got to spend any time there on Game of Thrones, so it could have been fun to see more of it.
We're not posting the pictures here because we don't want to risk the ire of anyone at Warner Bros. Discovery, but they're out there, ready to be gawked at. As for the Game of Thrones prequel that did get made, HBO is airing the second season of House of the Dragon sometime this summer, and is hard at work on another prequel series called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: The Hedge Knight. That probably won't be along until 2025 at the earliest.
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