House Of The Dragon’s prosthetics designer is making The Last Of Us’ monsters

Possibly the best thing to come out of HBO’s House Of The Dragon—aside from “Negroni… sbaglioto… with Prosecco”—is everything said or done by Paddy Considine’s King Viserys, including the very slow and very gross decay he experienced due to some unspecified flesh-eating disorder over the course of the show’s first eight episodes. Considine’s performance was great, but part of what sold it was the increasing horror of his condition, which was created by prosthetics designer Barrie Gower and the rest of the show’s effects team.

Variety has a piece on Gower (who won three Emmys for his Game Of Thrones prosthetics work and won another for his creating everybody’s friend Vecna on Stranger Things), in which he explains how they went from a “small, grape-sized ulcer” on Considine/Visery’s back to the Two-Face/Gus Fring-style half-skull he has just before his death. It’s a big shock when Viserys takes off the gold mask he had been wearing to reveal his real face to his family, with an empty eye socket and chunks missing from his cheek and jaw, and Gower says that was done with a mix of prosthetics and visual effects.

His entire face was covered in make-up with some bits of it painted green so they could create, for example, the hole in Viserys’ cheek that you could see when he talked. Gower told Variety that the goal wasn’t to make it scary, but to make viewers feel sad for what Viserys had gone through.

And, in keeping with the theme of decay and people being sad, Gower’s next HBO show is the TV adaptation of the PlayStation video game The Last Of Us, which involves a fungus that turns people into mushroom zombies. The most iconic of these is called a “Clicker,” which are zombies who have had their head ripped open by fungus, leaving them to use enhanced hearing to find victims. One of them showed up for a second in the recent Last Of Us trailer, and Gower says that making them was “a bit of a dream come true” for a “monster maker” like him. He teases that the scripts for the show are “fantastic” and that it has a lot of “really terrifying moments” that will make fans of the games “very happy.”