Daemon and Viserys’ poignant moment on House Of The Dragon wasn’t scripted

[The following contains spoilers for the House Of The Dragon episode “The Lord Of The Tides”]

The most recent episode of HBO’s House Of The Dragon was a lot, with a emotionally complex dinner party and a misunderstood conversation that is going to annoyingly serve as the basis of an entire war, but one of its best moments—arguably one of the best moments in the whole Game Of Thrones HBO franchise—came after Paddy Considine’s King Viserys made his dramatic “I’d like an Emmy, please” entrance during the big debate sequence.

Halfway through the episode, with his body intensely decayed from the disease that his made him age 100 years while his relatives haven’t aged at all, Viserys slowly limps his way to the Iron Throne while everyone looks on in stunned silence. After stumbling on one of the steps up to his pointy chair, his crown falls off and is quickly retrieved by his brother, Daemon (Matt Smith), who has basically been a big dick to Viserys for the whole show. Daemon helps his brother to throne and quietly places the crown back on his head, silently acknowledging both the fact that he’s been a dick for his whole life and that Viserys is a relatively nice guy who doesn’t deserve to be visibly rotting to death.

And, somehow, that wasn’t in the script. Yes, much like Tony Stark’s final line in Avengers: Endgame, this incredibly important bit that sums up an entire character arc and relationship wasn’t planned, which makes us wonder what the heck it is that writers do all day. (As writers, we’re allowed to make that joke.) Considine revealed this fun fact during an interview with Complex, saying it was an accident that his crown fell off during the scene and that Matt Smith just happened to pick it up. They decided to keep the take going, with Considine slumping down into the throne and Smith kneeling down a little to place it on his head, and afterward Considine went to episode director Geeta Vasant Patel and said “that’s the moment” to make sure she got it.

She did, of course, because it’s in the episode, but it still feels a little like finding out that Jack Gleeson came up with the idea to behead Sean Bean on set and didn’t tell anybody until after Ned Stark’s head had been taken off. But if you want to take a more optimistic read, it could be argued that this moment speaks to a looser philosophy that’s going into the making of this show versus what happened with original Game Of Thrones, which got so bogged down in the very specific story it wanted to tell that it started to break some rules and drop some storylines simply to make it work.

Considine notes that “these accidents” can make for “really poignant moments,” and that having “the allowance to do that by the powers that be” can make “the job so much more satisfactory.” Also, it’s not really relevant to this, but Considine compares playing Viserys to Jim Carrey’s Grinch elsewhere in the interview, which is funny (even if he’s talking about getting anxious from having elaborate makeup on all day).