One of the biggest criticisms levelled at Game Of Thrones was its disparity between male and female on-screen nudity – and it seems spin-off House Of The Dragon is keen to remedy that.
The latest instalment of the prequel series featured an extended sequence set in a brothel, which made TV history of sorts as the first scene in any Game Of Thrones show to feature an erect penis.
Not only that, the scene came to a climax (sorry!) with Aegon Targaryen catching his brother Aemond in the act, only to wind up humiliating him in a manner reminiscent of the bullying Aegon subjected Aemond to in their younger years.
At the end of the exchange, Aemond coldly walks away from the scene without bothering to dress, with director Geeta Vasant Patel telling Variety that Ewan Mitchell threw himself into going fully nude for the sequence, rather than using a double or prosthetic.
“Ewan is such a great actor. He understands what he needs to do in order to portray Aemond,” she enthused.
“When I spoke with him originally about the nudity, I said to him, ‘Let’s just go through the story. If you don’t feel comfortable being nude, then you’re not going to be nude’. We were both on the same page in that way. We started walking through, and he walked me through his character.
“One thing about directing that’s really important is to surrender to the actors, and the actors surrender. It’s a mutual surrendering. In this case, Ewan knew his character so well that I was listening to him and walking with him as we went through every episode before this.”
She explained: “What we came to is that Aemond was hurt. He was bullied when he was little. Since he was hurt, he had created this persona that was the exact opposite of how he was feeling.
“He created the persona of a someone who is callous and has no regard for what others think of him. That shift, from someone who’s vulnerable to literally watching him put on his armour, was what we were going for in that scene. It’s one of the few times you see the young child in him and you see the pain in him.
“Slowly he starts putting on his armour and when he stands up, the fact that he doesn’t care that you see his penis is such a strong visceral shift. And so, of course, Ewan was like, ‘I want to be fully nude in that moment. It’s important to me because that’s who my character is. That’s what he would do’. And that’s what we did.”
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In a separate interview with Vulture, Ewan agreed it was “encoded in Aemond’s DNA” for the character to leave the scene in the way he does.
“He’s humiliated by his brother and all his crew, and it’s like this switch flips,” he said of his character.
“The madam is no more. All of these people in front of him? They mean nothing. He stands up, he owns it. ‘Yeah, I’m bulletproof. Anything you say, it will not work’.”
Ewan added: “Scenes like this start with a conversation about how far you’re prepared to go. It wasn’t a choice we made lightly. But it’s true to Aemond that he shocks the audience. Weakness is not part of Aemond’s vocabulary.”
House Of The Dragon airs on Mondays on Sky and Now.
