Inside the biggest ‘House of the Dragon’ dragon fight yet — and that game-changing death

Warning: This article contains major spoilers from House of the Dragon season 2, episode 4, “The Red Dragon and the Gold.”

“There is no war so hateful to the gods as a war between kin and no war so bloody as a war between dragons.” 

House of the Dragon’s Princess Rhaenys Targaryen (Eve Best) knew the histories like her cousin, the late King Viserys (Paddy Considine). She knew what would happen if anyone unleashed dragons on the battlefield and the destruction to both sides that decision would cause. She’s done her best to impress the weight of that eventuality onto Queen Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) and the members of the Black Council as Westeros plunges into turmoil with poignant lines like the one above. That time has now come with the Battle of Rook’s Rest, a formative conflict in the Targaryen civil war that plays out at the midway point of the Game of Thrones prequel’s second season. 

“This is the first nuclear conflict,” series co-creator and showrunner Ryan Condal tells Entertainment Weekly of Rook’s Rest. “At the end of this, the world has effectively seen mushroom clouds on the horizon, and they know that we’ve now moved into a different era of the war. The whole strategy of the war changes after this because everything is so different. This is the thing that Viserys was terrified of. This is the thing that Rhaenys, sitting at her council table, was terrified of.”

The Battle of Rook’s Rest is one of two large-scale fight sequences that will be adapted from George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Blood over the course of the eight-episode sophomore season. Prince Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) and Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), now the Hand of the King to Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carnery), set a trap in motion for Rhaenyra’s forces by laying siege to Rook’s Rest, a territory in the custody of Lord Simon Staunton (Michael Elwyn), a member of Rhaenyra’s war council. “The more I read the script, the more I realized it’s not really a battle. It’s something else,” says Alan Taylor, the Game of Thrones veteran who has directed multiple episodes of House of the Dragon, including “The Red Dragon and the Gold.”

He continues, “It’s an army attacking a castle, but the castle is never the point. It’s all a ruse to draw out a dragon. The challenge was to shake the story momentum, given that you’re pretending to do one thing but actually doing something else. And when the dragons turn up, it really becomes about them.”

Rhaenys mounts Meleys, dubbed the Red Queen, to meet Criston on the battlefield, but she’s surprised by both Aemond, on his dragon Vhagar, and Aegon, riding Sunfyre. The ensuing dogfight in the skies results in the slaying of Rhaenys and her dragon, Aegon seemingly on his deathbed, and Rook’s Rest in ruins. 

“Reading the script for the first time, it’s a pretty apocalyptic event,” Mitchell recalls.

“It came straight off the page, especially when we were in the read-through right at the start of the process,” Glynn-Carney adds. “We all sat around the table — the whole cast and directors, producers, writers, some great actors who stepped in for the day to read the stage directions — and it just really came alive.”

Book-to-screen changes

Because Martin’s original text provides only the general beats of what transpired at Rook’s Rest, Condal and his writers engineered new and complex character drama to make the fight more compelling — starting with the fact that Aegon isn’t supposed to be there at all, even though the book makes it seem like he and Aemond are in concert together. Earlier in the episode, he feels insulted by both his brother, who undermines him in front of the Small Council, and his mother Alicent (Olivia Cooke), who tells him plainly to do nothing and listen to his betters. With the help of some liquid courage, he decides to join the fray against everyone’s wishes. 

“It’s all about concealing vulnerability with Aegon,” Glynn-Carney explains. “He doesn’t do a great, great job of it, but his intention is to give this impression that he’s this formidable, strong, stoic influence across the entirety of Westeros, and yet really he’s a young boy trying to work it out, not really knowing where to start.” 

Adds Taylor, “He is in the battle for the stupidest of reasons. Still, he was trying to do the right thing. The poor guy, he was trying to be heroic, he was trying to find a purpose for himself.”

The original plan was simple: The Greens wait for one of Rhaenyra’s dragons to arrive in defense of Rook’s Rest. Then Aemond, who’s hiding in the trees, pops out with the largest fire-breather in the world to cut down the number of Team Black dragons.

Things change once the king arrives. Aemond intentionally delays the trap, allowing Rhaenys, a much more formidable warrior and dragon rider, to rough him up. When Aemond finally does emerge, he commands Vhagar to breathe fire at both Aegon and his attacker. Rhaenys easily shakes off the attack, but Aegon and Sunfyre are hit with full force, plummeting towards the earth. A small explosion of flame erupts in the distance to mark the moment they hit the ground. 

“We really talked a lot about how, when the dragons land, they’re fire made flesh. So that’s like nuclear bombs going off on the ground,” Condal says. “You see the devastation that Sunfyre leaves in the woods.”

As for the fate of Aegon? Readers of Fire and Blood know what happens next. Condal, however, teases, “We come out of it with Aegon in an unknown condition. Certainly his dragon is not in good shape.”

Did Aemond do all this intentionally to secure the Iron Throne for himself? Just how calculating was he with each of these movements?

“It was no secret that he felt like Aegon was inferior to himself,” Mitchell says. “He felt like Aegon lacked the perseverance to be a leader. Also, it’s no secret that Aegon was almost the ringleader to a lot of Aemond’s childhood torment and trauma.”

At the same time, the actor adds, “I think that maybe Aemond would never have intended to burn Aegon, but it just so happened that Aegon was there tangled with Rhaenys and Meleys when he was on top of Sunfyre. It raises the question of whether or not he would’ve done that or if Aegon was just collateral damage. I think that’s compelling. Maybe it was when Aegon brought in the Pink Dread [as children] when Aemond was like, ‘I’m going to burn him one day for this.’ Who knows?”

Taylor elaborates: “We wanted to sustain multiple motivations that might have happened there. It’s a battle move, but he did deliberately join the battle late, and he is being a little bit indiscriminate with how he’s blasting fire. So I think you can believe whatever you want to believe about his motivations there.”

As intriguing as this character drama is, Taylor thinks the entire sequence was really about the Queen Who Never Was. In additional tweaks to the source material, Rhaenyra is the one determined to fly out to Rook’s Rest, but it’s Rhaenys who volunteers in her stead. Later, after Rhaenys survives Vhagar’s assault and has every opportunity to get away, she makes the decision to turn back and face Aemond. “That decision became the tentpole of the scene, shaping everything else around it,” Taylor says. “It goes way back to season 1, to her decision not to toast the Greens when she could have, and to the death of her grandson [Elliot Grihault’s Lucerys Velaryon] at the hands of this very beast. She has to go back in.”

Best references the 2003 Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai when reflecting on Rhaeny’s ultimate choice. “She’s got that nobility of that absolute samurai: honorable, noble, f—ing cool-ass warrior queen,” she says. “The honorable thing is that she could have escaped, and then she’s like, ‘No, we’ve got to go back.’ Because there’s the potential to end it. I think she knows she’s going back to die, but she has to try because if Vhagar can be taken down, then it’s done. It’s cauterized. The potential for nuclear war is cut down.”

Dragon dogfights

House of the Dragon gave viewers a taste of what dragon-on-dragon warfare would look like in the season 1 finale, but that was more of a chase between the monolithic Vhagar and Lucerys Velaryon’s comparatively pint-sized steed Arrax. “That looks like such small fry compared to this,” Best says.

“As great as that Storm’s End sequence was, it was really more of a prototype or proof of concept that we could do something like this on this level,” Condal says. “Rook’s Rest was incredibly complicated because the dragons are also interacting with the ground, so you have visual effects elements and fire elements and stunts and burns and things like that.”

Taylor agrees that Vhagar smashing into the ground after Rhaenys swoops back around on Meleys was the episode’s “the biggest moment” technically. “That was one of the more challenging things that involved stuntmen on wires and blasting cannons with debris and getting Fabian to ride a horse, which is already challenging,” he says. “But I think the real challenge was trying to tell these two stories on the ground and in the air and make sure that they connected to each other and became one story.” 

For the dragon combat in the sky, Taylor’s producing partner Jane Wu mapped out the entire sequence through storyboards. They passed videos back and forth of birds of prey on the offensive. “It’s very common in the predatory bird world if you’re being attacked to do this maneuver where you go upside down and engage talon to talon,” Taylor says. “You see these birds going into a kind of pinwheel chaotic fall. We stole that idea and applied it to Vhagar and Meleys. It became one of the centerpiece action moments.”

It was crucial to give this upside-down maneuver to Rhaenys. She is, as the filmmaker puts it, “by far the best dragon rider and the most experienced warrior in this group.” Aemond and Aegon, on the other hand, are “impetuous young men who are chasing glory” — which ultimately makes her death so unforgiving.

The production created a piece of dragon-riding equipment to reflect that. “I thought it’d be fun to have her actually anticipate that [maneuver],” Taylor says. “She tightens her seatbelt so that she can be prepared for the upside-down move. For me, it was one of those martial arts movements where the hero finally is going to get really serious now.”

Condal confirms that the Volume stage at Leavesden Studios in the U.K. — the near-360-degree floor-to-ceiling room of LED screens used to shoot the dragon flights for House of the Dragon season 1 — is now out of commission. “Warner Bros. moved on from that installation for a host of reasons,” he says. But the actors still used the mechanical buck, and the crew still used some LED screen elements to project imagery of the sky so they could react.

Best says she filmed her dragon-riding scenes for two weeks in front of stagehands shooting leaf blowers at her face. “I tell you, my core muscles and my thigh muscles have never worked so hard in their lives,” the actress recalls playfully. “I kept asking for more cushions. It got to me. I certainly felt not in my comfort zone, but I managed to cling on, and I’m glad that I sold it. It’s intense, also, because there’s no letup. There are no other actors. It’s just you.”

Mitchell and Glynn-Carney shot their sequences on the buck stage separately. “It’s always fun on the back of the dragon. You just want to ride it,” Mitchell says of his experience. “There’s so many moving parts when you shoot those scenes — very technical parts — that it can often feel like chaos, but because Alan Taylor was behind the wheel, you never felt like you lost control.”

“I was riding it as if it were a horse,” Glynn-Carney says of the buck. “When you’re riding a horse, you neutralize the horse’s movements with your body so you can stay as steady and with the rhythm of the horse as possible. But what they wanted me to do was be at the mercy of the dragon and let it throw me about. I think it was maybe somewhere in their intentions to make Aegon look like he didn’t know what he was doing, whereas in my head, I was like, ‘I want to look heroic, I want to look great, I want to look like I really know my way around this dragon.’ Everyone else just looks so f—ing cool, and then you get Aegon, who’s clueless.”

Eulogy for the Red Queen

In the face of so many moving parts, the key cast and crew found beauty within the destruction. Condal remembers how, long ago, well before taking the reins of House of the Dragon, he spent years trying to make a movie adaptation of John Milton’s Biblical epic Paradise Lost, but it never came to fruition. Of the injured dragons falling from the sky, he says, “I can’t say that those images weren’t in my head of when God casts the archangels out of Heaven and nine days they fell, and seeing these beautiful winged creatures being ruined on their descent into Hell.”

For Rhaenys, it became about the crescendo of character moments. It starts before the battle even begins with the princess laying her head against Meleys and accepting that this could be a kamikaze mission. It ends when she sees Meleys’ lifeless eyes in the maws of Vhagar and she lets go of her reins.

“There was something very beautiful about it,” Best says. “It was a moment of total surrender and letting go of everything she’d been carrying for two seasons: never, ever letting anybody see any of her pain, any of her anguish, any of her fear, any of her vulnerability, and just being this rock of wisdom and grace and stoicism and goodness and badassery at the same time. I think for her to finally let go was the most wonderful relief.”

Martin’s Fire and Blood includes an illustration of Meleys’ corpse curled around Rhaenys’ charred, unrecognizable remains in the aftermath of the battle. Taylor says they shot scenes of Rhaenys on the ground after the fight, but they were ultimately cut.

“It’s always like that,” he explains of the process, also noting how they cut additional moments with Freddie Fox’s Ser Gwayne Hightower. “I think the impulse behind that choice was to make sure that we stayed focused on the key storylines.”

However, he does admit that the depiction was on his mind when the camera opened on the remains of Aegon and Sunfyre. “That image comes from the same impulse: There is a beautiful connection between dragon and rider,” he says. “I really liked this idea that, even in death or [when they’re] in really bad shape, they are almost protectively coiled around the rider.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

The game has now changed for this current game of thrones. Rhaenyra has lost her staunchest and wisest supporter on the Black Council, the members of which constantly urge her towards fire and blood — even going so far as to consider treasonous moves behind her back. This will surely cause even more internal chaos once Rhaenys’ husband and the head of Rhaenyra’s fleet, Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint), hears of this loss — especially since it was the Black Queen who was meant to fly into battle. Numbers-wise, the queen has also lost one of the biggest and fastest dragons in her arsenal. 

To put it bluntly, “They’re going to be really screwed without her,” Best says. 

On the other side, Taylor teases that this is an “absolutely devastating” moment for Criston, who orchestrated the play with Aemond to begin with.

“He’s seen at a soldier-eye view how insignificant one knight on a horse is when you have these gods fighting in the sky overhead,” Condal adds. “There’s also this element of mortality. You’ll see how that plays out in episode 5 — this idea that dragons have died in the world before, but they haven’t been murdered. This is murder. It’s seeing a superhero made mortal. When Cole walks across that landscape, [he sees that] literally hundreds more people are dead because these giant megaton bombs fell out of the sky on them. It’s not a pleasant thing, dragon warfare.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to the episode title as “A Dance of Dragons.” Episode 4 is titled “The Red Dragon and the Gold.”