Imagine House of the Dragon With These Deleted Scenes Included

With its first season running on an accelerated timeline — 20-plus years in ten episodes — some meaningful House of the Dragon moments were bound to get left by the wayside. There are scenes that were never filmed (including any interactions between Rhaenyra Targaryen and Harwin Strong before we meet their, ahem, kids) and deleted sequences that could’ve colored the series’ characters even brighter. With the Dance of the Dragons finally in motion following the season-one finale, series co-creators Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik deemed these moments too small to delay the Targaryen civil war even further. In some cases, they’re probably right (we certainly didn’t need any more shots of Aemma’s blood-soaked bed), but it would’ve been nice to see others (literally any crumb of Rhaenyra and Alicent before the latter’s wedding!). Here’s all the evidence we could find of the House of the Dragon scenes that didn’t make the final cut.

The Prophecy and the Spare

In the premiere episode, we see Viserys (Paddy Considine) reveal a major prophecy to Rhaenyra — a change put forth by George R.R. Martin despite no mention of it in his book Fire & Blood, but it’s information Game of Thrones watchers are very familiar with — in which a Targaryen must be seated on the Iron Throne to unite the realm against, well, you know. Considine told the New York Times that his character hinted at the prophecy to his brother, Daemon, in a deleted scene Considine says was cut for good reason: “The tone of the scene was never quite right. There’s no way that Daemon would even connect to that — he’d laugh Viserys out of the room.” The show has established that the prophecy only passes between Targaryen rulers, so this was probably a good cut on Condal and Sapochnik’s part; if Daemon was never told about the prophecy, he was never truly considered for heir.

Mourning the Heir

In an interview with Josh Horowitz, Considine discussed how Siân Brooke’s performance as Queen Aemma shaped the way he approached Viserys: “She left this impression on me, and it just changed the course of how I played the character. I went, This is the thing that this man carries for the rest of his life.” For the scene in which Aemma dies during a forced C-section, “what we shot was ten times more brutal than what you saw. He was ten times more devastated than what you saw,” Considine revealed. Another poignant moment was also excluded from that episode: A maester informing Viserys, sitting on the blood-soaked bed where Aemma just died, of the death of their newborn son, Baelon. In the series, we see the maester holding Baelon as the baby gurgles and foreboding music plays followed, a few moments later, by a cut to Aemma and Baelon’s funeral pyres. “It was probably the right choice really,” Considine said of the deletion, adding that the emotional impact remains in the final edit.

Frenemy Territory

Condal confirmed in an interview with Variety that they never filmed Alicent and Viserys’s wedding. However, they did shoot a scene with Rhaenyra helping Alicent into her wedding gown, paralleling “the first episode where Alicent helps Rhaenrya dress for her naming ceremony.” Hairstylist Tania Tyatyambo Couper posted since-deleted close-up photos of Emily Carey, who played young Alicent, wearing an elaborate updo and a dragon-inspired wedding gown. While House of the Dragon made efforts to craft a more meaningful relationship between young Alicent and Rhaenyra, losing moments like the pre-wedding détente omits crucial context about the pair’s complicated feelings toward each other. We see their precious beginnings and noxious turn, but we’d have a much better grasp of the depth of their relationship if the show took pains to dig further into their early fractures.

What’s worse, a spat between the two friends was also filmed and cut. Director Gregory Yaitanes confirmed in his Instagram Stories that both the wedding-dress scene and a fight between young Rhaenyra and Alicent were chopped: “Two scenes that unfortunately didn’t make it into the final cut, the aftermath fight between @millyalcock and @theemilycarey — both were quite powerful.”

Another Side of Ser Criston

Oh, Criston. He went from dreamboat to worst nightmare, but before his anger-fueled turn to the Greens, he filmed his entry into the Kingsguard, as Fabien Frankel revealed to Vulture, including his recitation of Kingsguard vows — the very ones he later uses to justify his hate for the young Rhaenyra for “making” him break them. Frankel explained, “We fought to try and get it back, but it was just a dodgy camera thing that meant it wasn’t in there.” This scene certainly would’ve provided more clarity about his ugly feelings toward Rhaenyra’s “betrayal.”

Daemon’s Daughters

As with Harwin and Rhaenyra, much of Daemon and Laena’s relationship does not appear onscreen thanks to that big time jump between episodes five and six. Coming into six, we find Daemon and Laena married in Pentos with twin girls, Baela and Rhaena. Laena dies at the end of the episode, leaving Daemon and his daughters mourning their loss in a quiet scene in which Daemon sits with them before coolly departing. Curiously, HBO tweeted and deleted a photo that shows him hugging his girls with the caption, “A loving father’s embrace.” A weird move on their part, sure, but this particular scene with Daemon and his girls — along with the fact that several of the scenes on this list involve Daemon — suggests that Condal, Sapochnik, and their writing team spent a lot of time figuring out Daemon’s arc. Obviously, a saint he is not, but Daemon is a fascinatingly gray and unpredictable character (and one of Martin’s favorites to write), making it difficult to pin down the right number of good versus bad moments. That said, it would’ve been useful to understand what kind of father he is, especially since season one was light on Daemon and Rhaenyra’s whole blended-family deal.

The Final Toast

Viserys’s aching walk toward the Iron Throne in episode eight made for a powerful scene thanks to Considine and Matt Smith’s improvisation: Viserys’s crown falling was not scripted, nor was Daemon picking it up, but their acting choices transformed the walk into a moment of quiet contrition between the formerly bickering brothers. After filming the scene with the actors’ tweaks multiple times, episode director Geeta Patel told Entertainment Weekly that she, Smith, and Considine discussed whether they needed a scene with Daemon toasting Viserys at the family dinner later in the episode. “Are we gonna undercut that moment?” Patel said they asked themselves. The dinner scene was filmed, but EW confirmed in an editor’s note that “Daemon’s speech was cut for time and did not make the final cut.”