House of the Dragon Star Says THAT Bloody Scene Was Even More Brutal to Film

By Jamie Jirak

House of the Dragon premiered this weekend, and it broke HBO viewing records. The early reviews for the show have been extremely positive, and it is currently up on Rotten Tomatoes with an 83% critics score and 86% audience score. ComicBook.com's Jamie Lovett gave the prequel series a 4 out of 5 and called it a "welcome return to Westeros." However, there was one particularly brutal scene in the first episode that got mixed reactions from fans. In "The Heirs of the Dragon," Queen Aemma (Sian Brooke) dies after an extremely graphic birth scene in which her baby is born via a primitive C-section. Paddy Considine, who plays Aemma's husband, Viserys I, talked about the scene during a press roundtable (via Insider). 

"Those were hard days filming," Considine recalled. "It was tough to shoot. It's all make believe, but it was tough." He added, "It was very emotional ... In fact, it was a lot more brutal and a lot more emotional than it ends up in the final episode. And I wasn't sure about that when I first saw it." He continued, "Maybe it was too much because Viserys is utterly devastated, and maybe that was too much to show early on. I think they really cut it down really well."

"We went for it, and there's a lot of tears," Considine added. "But props to Sian because she was going through the physicality of everything. It was a very physical bit of work from her."

You can read HBO's official synopsis for House of the Dragon here: "The prequel series finds the Targaryen dynasty at the absolute apex of its power, with more than 15 dragons under their yoke. Most empires-real and imagined-crumble from such heights. In the case of the Targaryens, their slow fall begins almost 193 years before the events of Game of Thrones, when King Viserys Targaryen breaks with a century of tradition by naming his daughter Rhaenyra heir to the Iron Throne. But when Viserys later fathers a son, the court is shocked when Rhaenyra retains her status as his heir, and seeds of division sow friction across the realm."

In addition to Considine, House of the Dragon also stars Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emma D'Arcy, Steve Toussaint, Eve Best, Sonoya Mizuno, Fabien Frankel, and Rhys Ifans

House of the Dragon's second episode will be available to watch on HBO on August 28th.

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