House of the Dragon director confirms a major character is dead

Warning: This article contains major spoilers from House of the Dragon episode 8.

The Many-Faced God has come to claim another soul with the eighth episode of House of the Dragon.

Six years after the events of episode 7, the Game of Thrones prequel picks up with Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) and her growing family heading back to King's Landing to defend the legitimacy of her son, Luke Velaryon (Elliot Grihault), as heir to the Driftmark throne against a petition brought by Vaemond Velaryon (Wil Johnson). There she finds her father, King Viserys I Targaryen (Paddy Considine), in even worse shape than she realized. His ailments have now claimed one of his eyes and largely left him bedridden, unable to walk for long bouts while mumbling to himself in a haze from milk of the poppy.

After Viserys makes one more push to protect Rhaenyra and her children from the relentless Greens, it's clear he's not long for this world. The hour's final scene sees Queen Alicent (Olivia Cooke) putting him to bed. Believing her to be Rhaenyra in his dazed state, he starts speaking about Aegon the Conqueror's prophecy, leading Alicent to believe the king wants her to put their son, Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney), on the throne. She leaves her husband to sleep as the sound of Viserys' labored breathing grows louder. He reaches a hand upwards to no one visible but to himself. "My love..." he utters before another exhale is heard and the screen cuts to black.

Geeta Patel, who directed episode 8, confirms to EW what this means: the reign of the good King Viserys Targaryen, first of his name, has come to an end. The Dance of the Dragons can begin.

"I think the last scene of this episode was always a litmus test. Every time we'd watch or think it through, when we got to that last scene, did we feel what we wanted to feel there?" Patel says in an interview. "Did we feel the loss? Did we feel that Viserys has told his story? Did we feel that he loved his wife who passed away? Did he love Alicent? Did he love Rhaenyra? Did he regret anything? All the complicated layers of Viserys, did we feel it for better or worse?"

The death of Viserys is a significant moment in the Dance of the Dragons, the civil war that's about to tear apart House Targaryen. The last referee — perhaps the only referee — keeping the peace between the Blacks (Team Rhaenyra) and the Greens (Team Alicent) from destroying each other is now off the chess board. The real battle to put either Rhaenyra or Aegon on the Iron Throne is about to kick into high gear.

But first, Patel unpacks the major moments of season 1, episode 8, from Alicent's moment with Diana to the beheading of Vaemond Velaryon (Wil Johnson) to Viserys' final scene.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: That day I was on set for episode 8 was kind of crazy. There was smoke rising above the ground from this boiler in the floor for Dragonstone. The biggest memory that sticks out to me, though, was Dragonstone was the coldest set.

GEETA PATEL: Yes, it was. We all had layers on that day. Somebody told me that it was gonna be cold and warned me, and so I'm glad I did do that 'cause it's hard to work when you're shivering.

For you, what was the biggest memory that stands out from filming this episode?

There's not even [just] one. This was the best experience I've had as a director on a job. This was everything I thought it was gonna be, in the best way. There are beautiful moments. One of the objectives of this episode was to get inside Rhaenyra and Alicent's heads. 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.

One of the moments I loved was when we were filming a scene with Rhaenyra. It just felt like we were watching her instead of [being] with her. It's when she arrives to King's Landing and she gets out of this chariot, presents herself, and is very nervous, obviously, because she hasn't been back in so many years. This is a place that, in her mind, judged her and made her into someone she didn't want to be, and here she is as someone who has found herself. She's this little girl coming back. As you probably saw when you were visiting, we're always rushing, rushing, rushing. Out of time, especially that day. We don't have any daylight left. I had this thought of, "Well, why are we watching her coming out of this chariot? It feels like the story is actually the moment right before she comes out." So the cinematographer Katie [Goldschmidt] and I were like, "Okay, we've got 10 minutes." Everybody, the whole crew, was on board with this idea. Everybody was about the story. We moved as fast as we could, got [D'Arcy] inside the chariot, had everything figured out already 'cause we knew it was something we wanted to try. We shot that moment of [Rhaenyra] just sitting there, and then a light went out inside [the chariot]. We were like, "Wow, that looks better than it did lit." It's just magical moments where the story is telling you, "Hey, yeah, this is the right direction to go."

I was speaking to a few of the actors previously and they would credit some of the directors, like Clare Kilner and Greg Yaitanes, for helping to shape the characters and the performances. It sounds like you had a very similar experience on this episode. Is that fair to say?

Well, I think it was a partnership. That's the reason I do what I do, is to work with the actors. My brother's an actor [Meet the Patels' Ravi Patel]. He's the one that introduced me to the magic that they have as performers. Yes, I love all the bells and whistles of cinematography. I love the long takes, I love the big crane shots, but I will give them up in a second to get a few extra takes of performance, if we feel like there's something happening that we need to embrace. I think that's why this was really fun. All of the actors were top of their game and worked so hard to bring dimension to who they were playing. There's very little that's more fun than that in this job.

Even though there's so much going on in this episode, it still in some respects feels like the calm before the storm because we know that as soon as Viserys dies, things are gonna kick into high gear. Did it feel like that when you were reading the scripts and coming up with your approach for this episode?

It definitely felt like that was the story that we wanted to tell, and I think making it come to life was a team effort. [Series showrunners] Ryan [Condal] and Miguel [Sapochnik] were very clear that they wanted the stakes to be very high as far as all these strings holding this realm together just barely. That takes every level of storytelling, in my mind, to create. So we were constantly having meetings and going through the scenes and triple checking — quadruple checking — every single scene to make sure that the strings were pulled as tight as they could, like they were at the breaking point. It took conversations with the actors, understanding that nothing could be black and white. Nothing. Everything had to be tentative, in a way.

I feel like Alicent and Rhaenyra are always looking for ways to patch this relationship, but because of the machinations of everyone around them and certain things that transpire, it's like they're constantly bound for tragedy, which makes it even more tragic. I don't know how you felt about that dynamic in this episode.

Coming into the episode, I disliked Alicent. She comes out of Miguel's episode and I kept telling Miguel, "Can you gimme something to go on?" He's like, "Nope, sorry." She's hanging out with Larys Strong last scene. "You gotta figure it out." I'm joking, but 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 Ryan and Miguel and myself in letting everything be the subtext.

Another moment that I really loved in filming this: there's a scene in the beginning of the episode where Alicent is talking to the girl that got raped by her son. 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." 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.

It reminds me of something [executive producer] Sara Hess said even before this show premiered. Everybody in the fandom has had good things and bad things to say about the original Game of Thrones' portrayal of women. But Sara made it clear, "Oh, we're not going to be depicting all these violent sexual acts against women. We have one scene that happens off camera and then we deal with the aftermath of it." And when I came across this, I was like, this must be that scene. Did you and also Sara have very clear ideas about how to approach the Diana moment?

Both Sara and I are close and we talk about — just as I do with Ryan, actually — all these moments, and I think we all were on the same page. We wanted the realism to be present in all of these scenes — meaning, yes, being raped or being hurt sexually is a serious thing. 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.

Another sequence I wanted to talk to you about is the Viserys of it all. I remember this particular sequence where he is making his labored march into the throne room during Vaemond's petition to be named heir of Driftmark. I remember it taking all day to complete. Was this a particularly intricate sequence to pull off?

That was a very, very big sequence. We had a lot of logistical obstacles during that time. Not worth getting into, but it was already the biggest thing that we had to do as far as Paddy [Considine's] turnaround. He had so much time in prosthetics getting ready for that, and then there was a conversation about him walking down the aisle. The real time of him walking down the aisle is just, like, you're looking at your watch as a producer and director going, "Oh my God, that's just the first take and it took, you know, 20 minutes." It's one of those things where I was approached at one point, I can't remember who came up to me, and said, "Maybe we should just cut around this." Like not really do it. "Let's just do it once." I was like, "No, we are gonna do the walk because the story is actually that he is walking down this aisle." He is in an extreme amount of pain. He is walking towards something. He wants to save the realm. If we cut it short, we would lose that element forever in the edit room. We would never have that possibility. So we just put our heads down and shot Paddy walking. Even for Paddy, that was a hard thing to do because he's got that cane and it hurts your back doing that walk more than once. But I'm very proud that we stuck to our guns because I do feel like that is what helps the emotion come out.

When Ryan and Miguel and I discussed that scene, we'd always thought his eyes are towards the throne. It was gonna be shot that way. You see Viserys exerting himself and then you see he's trying to get to the throne to help the realm. While we were rehearsing, Rhaenyra just happens to be standing there in the middle. I was like, "Oh, wait a minute. He's not walking to the throne, he's walking to her." At least from my own understanding, that put tears in my eyes right there during rehearsal, 'cause I'm the daughter of a father who loves me so much and he would've walked on fire for me. That's when all of a sudden, even though we had no time as usual because we're always maximizing, we did what we could to get that moment of Rhaenyra and Viserys. That was a wonderful discovery. I wish I thought of it a day before even. I would've shot more of it. But I'm so glad that we were able to get the shots we did and they did make it to the cut.

When you talk about that and also the lightbulb going out in the carriage, were there any other moments that ended up being really important to this episode that you found on the day shooting?

There was one moment in the throne room where Daemon helps Viserys up the stairs to the throne 'cause Viserys is so weak, he can't make it himself. First, a soldier comes up to Viserys, and Viserys shakes him away and says, "No, no, no. I can do this myself." He has the pride. And then another person comes to him and he thinks it's a soldier and it's actually his brother. When we were shooting that — I think the rehearsal again, the first day — the crown fell off of Paddy's head and Matt picked it up and we just kept going. We didn't stop [filming]. There was a discovery there of this moment. So then the three of us got together and they were like, "We felt this. This felt like the turning point in our relationship." It's just a silent moment. And then we thought to ourselves, "We have the dinner coming up where Daemon's gonna then give a speech. Are we gonna undercut that moment?" [Editor's note: Daemon's speech was cut for time and did not make the final cut.] We decided to shoot it both ways with the crown falling off and with the crown not falling off. Every time the crown fell off, all of us just caught our breath and at the same time we thought, "Will we have anywhere to go by the time we get to the dinner?" And funny enough, in the edit we discovered that the moment was actually the crown falling off, in my mind at least. Then when you got to the dinner, it was more of an aftermath moment. It was more about the dinner when Daemon gives that speech, there's too many people in the room almost for that to be the emotional moment. I was so thankful that accident happened, that the crown fell off because it proved to be, at least for me, quite a heavy moment and quite a turning point for a storyline that had started in the pilot: Hey, I want your crown and by the end here I'm gonna put the crown back on your head and I'm gonna help you to your throne.

I felt the exact same way with the crown, especially. It also just really emphasized the fact that maybe Viserys is thinking, "If this is the last thing I can do for my child, I'm going to do it no matter what." All the cinematic flourishes throughout this episode are setting up what, at least from my perspective as a viewer, felt like Viserys taking his very last breaths at the end of this episode. Is that the trajectory that you guys were going for?

Yeah. I think the last scene of this episode was always a litmus test. Every time we'd watch or think it through, when we got to that last scene, did we feel what we wanted to feel there? Did we feel the loss? Did we feel that Viserys has told his story? Did we feel that he loved his wife who passed away? Did he love Alicent? Did he love Rhaenyra? Did he regret anything? All the complicated layers of Viserys, did we feel it for better or worse? So, for me, that was always a moment that I would check myself on and then I'd go back to the drawing board and talk to Miguel and Ryan and be like, "I think we're not there there, we're they're here." Even the actors just trying constantly to check that that moment at the end worked. I mean, I hope it works, but that was the goal, for sure.

This has become such a water-cooler chat moment between me and my coworker who's seen the episode. We're debating who we think Viserys is seeing in his last moment. Is this Rhaenyra or is this Aemma? Is this Alicent, even? After all they've been through, does he really love Alicent? I'm curious what your take on that final moment is.

Well, I'm not a fair person to ask because I actually had the luxury of having a conversation with Paddy and he whispered to me who he was thinking of. So I probably shouldn't say it. I'll let him say it if he wants to say it, but I had the same question, and that's what I'm saying. It's just the best part of my job. It's so great just to be inside Paddy's mind as he's Viserys and to wonder, as well, which way is this gonna go?

You are also the first director on this show to work with the new crop of actors who are playing the children of Alicent and Rhaenyra. Specifically when it comes to Tom Glynn-Carney and Ewan Mitchell, who play Aegon and Aemond, were you very actively involved with the approach and where these characters really are in this time period?

Yeah, I was actively involved, but I should mention that Miguel and Ryan were really the masterminds of all these characters. I had my marching orders of what the story is supposed to be and that's where my job started with them. I knew what the story was, I knew what their turning points were, I knew what their conflict was, I knew where they came from, I knew the story of the pig, I knew all those things. Then I worked with them on performance. We get the time to work with the actors — we have rehearsals, we have lots of conversations — and in the end they brought it, they found their characters. Ewan was so creepy and gave me chills, and yet when he is off camera, he's the sweetest person you've ever met. 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.

And Tom, same thing. [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. 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.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.

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