On “House of the Dragon,” HBO’s fantasy epic that takes place two centuries before “Game of Thrones,” Matt Smith plays Daemon, a warrior prince who exists among fire-breathing reptiles and palace intrigue. But if his character were ever to leap deeper into the supernatural, Smith has some ideas about where he could go. “I think Daemon would make a really good vampire,” he says. “I can imagine him wandering the earth alone for all eternity.”
He certainly has the coloring: Pallid and platinum-blonde, Daemon looks as if he could have arrived in the forbidding and dark world of Westeros all the way from Transylvania. But he might be too hotblooded to play the vampire. And “House of the Dragon” — a prequel to the Emmy-gobbling, earth-shattering hit “Game of Thrones,” set during the reign of the incestuous Targaryen dynasty — is unlikely to pivot into creature horror.
But it’s easy to understand what Smith, the English actor who went into the series’ August 2022 premiere as the best-known member of the “House of the Dragon” ensemble, means. Daemon is proximate to power, but he’s — vampirically — too thirsty, too isolated, too much a creature of the night to really reign. “He’d probably make a terrible king,” Smith says.
As the show enters its second season, premiering June 16, the question of Daemon’s future — as king, or as lonely wanderer — remains unresolved. The first season raced through its setup: Daemon marries his niece, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy), to help secure her claim to the Iron Throne, but when her father and Daemon’s older brother, King Viserys (Paddy Considine), dies, Rhaenyra’s rivals within the family seize power for themselves. Now, the two are grieving the loss of their son while waging an intricate blood feud — and Daemon is setting off on his own, to settle scores and rally troops for the war to come.
“You never really know which way he’s going to go,” Smith says over a recent lunch in New York. “I always viewed him as an agent of chaos.” It’s not the first time that Smith’s added a daring touch of uncertainty to a familiar property. In 2009, when he was 26, Smith was announced as the youngest-ever Doctor on the iconic British sci-fi serial “Doctor Who,” and — despite the risk of turning off loyalists to the previous Doctor, the phenomenally popular David Tennant — won fans over. “I would walk down the street, and people would say ‘Don’t break “Doctor Who”!’” Smith says. “Because they had no idea who I was.” He’d considered turning the role down: “Briefly. But my agent, very quickly, was like, ‘You’re doing it.’ Thank God.”
Once the world knew him, he originated the character of Prince Philip in 2016 opposite Claire Foy’s Queen Elizabeth II on “The Crown,” in an Emmy-nominated turn. And now, “House of the Dragon” — the follow-up to HBO’s era-defining show — has brought him to new heights. The series, with U.K. shoots that are technically complex and arduous, is (along with “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus”) among the most important arrows in HBO’s quiver, now that “Succession” has wrapped and “Euphoria” remains in perpetual limbo. Its debut episode was the biggest start for an original series in the history of HBO and the biggest launch on the streaming service then called HBO Max; between linear and streaming, the series averaged 29 million viewers per episode, a total that perhaps only Westeros melodrama can summon in an era of fractured audience attention.
Smith, in other words, is the antihero of TV’s greatest spectacle. And, fittingly for an actor who spends his working days playing the ultimate power game, he is acutely aware of his own position in the world. He offhandedly remarks that he’d recently rewatched “Point Break,” and dreams of meeting Keanu Reeves: “People are either movie stars or actors, you know? And he’s an amazing fucking movie star.” As for where Smith himself falls relative to that divide, he dreams of a career like Gary Oldman’s or Joaquin Phoenix’s. “But you are never going to have a career like that,” he says. For a moment, it’s as if he’s speaking to himself. “Because someone always gets those parts before you.”
Which makes “House of the Dragon” an interesting test. Daemon provides a showcase through and through — reliant on Smith’s full-blast charisma and a familiar intellectual property. After “Game of Thrones” wrapped in 2019, at the peak of a Peak TV moment that has begun its decline, Smith felt ambivalent about “House of the Dragon” at first, fearing the show could never match all that had come before. “Audiences have changed,” Smith says. “The way TV is consumed has changed. You can see a market saturate itself and envelop itself, and become obsolete.”
When he first Zoomed with series creators Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik, Smith made his worries plain. “My concern is that we’ve seen this story told,” he says. “That’s the first thing I said.” It required, in other words, an agent of chaos to make it new.
In a black Saint Laurent sweatshirt, gesticulating with french fries quavering under the weight of dollops of mayonnaise, Smith is an animated conversation partner. But, when listening, he casts his brow down, giving you the full weight of his penetrating gaze and architectural cheekbones. He knows his angles; he’s a white-blonde wig away from the roguishly compelling Daemon.
“He’s got one of those faces that’s timeless,” says director Edgar Wright, who cast Smith as a villainous Swinging ’60s lothario in the 2021 film “Last Night in Soho.” “He is in person incredibly charming and handsome. And yet he doesn’t have any qualms about pushing against that.”
On “House of the Dragon,” that friction between seduction and aggression fits right in: It’s a universe in which sex and power are hopelessly intertwined. The show is based on sections of “Fire & Blood,” a 2018 book about the history of Westeros by George R.R. Martin, whose novels became “Game of Thrones.” And its central Targaryen family, whose various members have dueling claims on sovereignty, eventually reaches the end of the line with Daenerys, the “Game of Thrones” character played by Emilia Clarke. She closes the show by gaining power, becoming a dictator and meeting an untimely demise.
Fans revolted over that show’s endgame, and HBO’s immediate attempts to craft a spinoff began discouragingly. The network shot a pilot for an offshoot series called “Bloodmoon” — starring Naomi Watts and costing a reported $30 million — before killing it. Then, Sapochnik, a former “Game of Thrones” director, and Condal, a veteran screenwriter (his credits include the Dwayne Johnson vehicles “Hercules” and “Rampage”), teamed up for a series about the Targaryens, one that had obvious pressure on it to be done right. Smith’s name, and face, were on Condal’s mind as a potential star.
Condal says, “It was one of those rare instances where you have an actor’s headshot up on the writers’ board.”
That was in 2019. Eventually, in 2020, Smith and the creators met in person — a challenge in the pre-vaccine COVID era. “We had to go through two weeks of preparations just to get in the room with the guy,” Condal says. “And he was dazzling.”
“We had to win each other over,” Smith says. He had the part, but his trepidation about the project persisted. “With the scale of it, there was a genuine concern: Will audiences even want it?”
The answer was a resounding yes. Among many other triumphs for “House of the Dragon,” including a best drama Emmy nomination in 2023: It demolished “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” which debuted on Amazon Prime Video effectively in lockstep with “House of the Dragon” — this after Amazon bought the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s series of novels for some $250 million. But as the season wore on, some critics came to feel the show’s lightning-fast pace — with multiple significant time jumps and lots of exposition — worked less well than the more granular “Game of Thrones.” We first meet heroine Rhaenyra as a child with a special bond with her uncle; we close the season with her as an adult, wed to him. Only in Westeros!
“We had to cover 20 years of time,” Condal says. (He’s speaking via Zoom from London, where he’s breaking the story for Season 3 while finishing post-production on Season 2.) “Rhaenyra had to grow up and have children, and those children had to grow up to fighting age in order for the war to kick off.” That kickoff concludes the first season, with one of Rhaenyra’s heirs devoured by a dragon belonging to a son of Rhaenyra’s rival Alicent (Olivia Cooke). Condal promises that the action in the new season will begin “a couple of days after the events of Season 1 — all the wounds are fresh,” and that it will move more methodically. (Methodical doesn’t mean dull, though: The show loses none of its willingness to indulge in violence, or to build up a body count.) “I think the pace will feel more like building momentum,” Condal says. “Season 1 felt breakneck because you were jumping time periods, whereas Season 2 feels like you light a fuse in Episode 1 and watch it go — and at points, little charges go off.”
No doubt several of those charges will be detonated by Daemon: After spending the latter half of the first season playing helpmeet to his queen, he’s now attempting to raise an army at the ancient castle Harrenhal while stirring up Rhaenyra’s suspicions that, far from home, he’s playing a double game to shore up his own position. “We definitely meet Daemon at a point of crisis in this situation, and in many ways, it’s a different version of him,” Smith says. “It’s one that’s much weaker.” Caught on the wrong foot by rivals within the family, Daemon is disempowered — and subject to the whims of a leader who is too consumed by pain to govern with a clear head, who also happens to be a wife whose trust he has lost. Smith’s slithering performance has, to this point, been a case study in controlled charisma, as he uses insinuation, and tensely coiled threat, to achieve his ends; seeing him in isolation promises to open up new dimensions, new colors.
And we’re losing something too: D’Arcy (who uses “they/them” pronouns) and Smith had an intriguing, juicy chemistry. D’Arcy’s performance recalled Clarke’s in the way it overlaid unbridled ambition with flashes of delusion. But Rhaenyra, before her grief over the events that ended Season 1 blotted out the sun, was both eager to win the game and to take pleasure along the way. The character’s hedonism gave a fast-moving show moments to stop and savor.
The dynamic Rhaenyra and Daemon shared is, in that deliciously perverse “Game of Thrones” way, rooted in their shared lineage. “That great Targaryen history is erotic energy for them,” says D’Arcy. “And they serve a little thing that’s missing in one another. Daemon offers a diagram for living — he expands her horizons massively. Meanwhile, Rhaenyra gives Daemon something to fight for.”
In the new season, Smith shares many scenes with Tony-winning stage legend Simon Russell Beale, who plays the guardian of Harrenhal, Westeros’ largest castle: “We used to just have a hoot!” Smith says. “He’d say, ‘Oh, darling, I’m bored of this acting. Come in here for some light chitchat.’ Amazing brain!” But losing D’Arcy as a scene partner was painful: “It was difficult to do it without them because I love them — a person of real depth and sardonic humor and fierce intellect.”
D’Arcy dreaded spending at least part of Season 2 separated from their scene partner. “It was kind of rubbish!” they say with a laugh. “The man has incredibly high standards, so you at least have a chance of the work being satisfying. I have petitioned for more time next season.”
Bonds between actors are buoying — and they can last. Smith remains close with Karen Gillan, the Scottish actress who played the Doctor’s companion (read: assistant and bestie) before going on to star in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Jumanji” movies. “I’m so proud of her,” he says. “She always had her eyes on the prize — she knew she wanted to move to L.A. and make big films, and she fucking did it.”
Smith is a little less certain in his ambitions. Star or actor — that’s the conundrum. “If you knew the things he hasn’t done, you’d be shocked!” Gillan tells me. “He’s turned down some huge things because they weren’t the right stories for him. And it was exactly the right move.”
And the intensity of a TV-actor workload forecloses much of life off-set. Describing his early “Doctor Who” days, Smith says: “I’m quite dedicated when I work, and it becomes a solitary experience. I probably need more balance. I get tunnel vision — I don’t think I make enough room for a life.” When on a job, he says, his life is “Eat, sleep, repeat — work.”
A TV set is its own world, where a hard worker can lose himself — and later have trouble finding himself once production wraps. Smith describes on-set relationships as “sporadic, intense points of connection. You’re all working tirelessly to create something and that is intoxicating. But ultimately, is that a healthy thing? I don’t know. Not according to therapy.”
Smith tends to brush off the pressures of the massive attention on “House of the Dragon”; he didn’t expect his show to match the success of the one that breathed fire over all of culture in the 2010s. Comparisons between the two series are “unavoidable, when you’re standing on the shoulders of a show that really got into the cultural zeitgeist of the world,” he says. “In a way, I was lucky, because I had that in ‘Doctor Who’ a bit. But it feels like people judge it on its own terms. You’re never going to create the moment in time that ‘Game of Thrones’ was — the love and affection and scale of that show. It’s never going to be that, because it was a moment in time.”
But that doesn’t mean Smith doesn’t feel some urgency. The departure of Sapochnik — who, as a director of six “Game of Thrones” episodes, was a connection to the franchise’s origins — came as a blow, and Smith grows contemplative when I ask about it. (A report in Puck indicated Sapochnik left after the show declined to include his wife among the producing team for Season 2.) “It’s a shame, because it had a great effect on the tone of the show, and knowing what you need to deliver,” Smith says. “It’s kind of second-album syndrome, isn’t it? You’ve got to play the hits a bit.” Sapochnik, who had directed three episodes of the series’ first season, knew how to satisfy fans — blending human-scale drama with fireworks. “People have got to feel like they’re getting some sense of a ‘Game of Thrones’-type of show,” Smith says. “We wish him well — but certainly, when you lose a director of that caliber, you’re going to feel it.”
Condal says his role as now-solo showrunner is largely unchanged. “My job is the same,” he says. “I would call it director-wrangling in a non-pejorative way. We had five directors this season over eight episodes.” That makes for a number of creatives that Condal says he has to “keep happy and oversee.” In all, the grandest show on earth is getting even grander. “Season 2 felt bigger and more diffuse.”
Theo Whiteman
Season 2 also faced the challenge of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 — but not in the usual way: “House of the Dragon” remained in production the entire time. Condal says that the scripts were done before the writers strike began, and the actors were governed by the British union Equity — the members of which had no legal protections were they to join the strike in solidarity with SAG-AFTRA.
To be drowning in work on what is ultimately an American television show, all while your counterparts stateside were spending their summer on the picket lines — it wasn’t easy. “I found it pretty uncomfortable,” D’Arcy says. “I found it like being between a rock and a hard place. We spoke about it all the time.” Smith provided support as the internal conflict roiled. “Matt’s one of the ballasts in my life. He’s a deeply thinking person.”
“There was a huge sense of conflict in us as performers and actors,” Smith says. He seems uncomfortable criticizing a production that’s so integral to his working life, but he continues. “We got together and discussed it in depth and made our feelings clear of what we’d like to do, but we didn’t have a great deal of choice. It was going to go on.”
Smith grew up understanding the team ethos; he came to acting from sports. Football was his passion as a young man, and his burgeoning interest in acting felt like a dark secret. “I was quite embarrassed at first, that I was doing it and that people are going to come see it.” He grew up in Northampton, an hour north of London and “a different planet,” he says, from the capital, and his identity in high school was built around his athleticism. Eventually, a sports-related back injury sidelined him, and he felt at a loss. “My love affair with football had become problematic. All of those dreams — the bridges that I’d built — were just blown up.” A drama teacher, seeing Smith’s charisma and talent, kept casting him in school plays against Smith’s stated desires, but a production of “12 Angry Men” was a turning point. “It felt easy to release,” he says. “And I could do it quite naturally.”
“Doctor Who” wasn’t on the air when Smith was growing up — its first iteration aired between 1963 and 1989, before the reboot that continues today began in 2005 — but, by the time he was establishing himself, it was a major hit. Run by prolific TV creator Russell T Davies, the show may well have reached its peak of acclaim with the Doctor played by Tennant. After Davies and Tennant both left the show, new showrunner Steven Moffat hired Smith.
“He definitely was feeling pressure, but it never showed in any way,” Gillan says. “To me, he is the best actor that’s ever played the Doctor, because he has an otherworldly quality. He’s naturally eccentric, and he reels off technical jargon like it’s a shopping list.”
It’s a role that defines careers, sometimes to an actor’s detriment. “Being Doctor Who is akin to being a former president or prime minister,” says Wright. “Maybe some other actors who played Doctor Who in the past have found it difficult to move on from it. Matt probably did exactly the right thing by taking on a wealth of very different parts in the immediate wake of that show.”
Nowadays, Smith has, oddly, cornered the market on thwarted princes — men who exist in close proximity to the throne but are prevented from wielding power. Condal says it was Smith’s performance as Prince Philip that convinced him he’d found his Daemon: “He’s playing second fiddle, in that case, to his wife. In this case, it’s first to his brother, then to his niece, then to his wife.” (Recall that these last two bosses for Daemon are the same character at different moments.)
Alex Bailey/Netflix
Smith’s take on Philip set the template for how later actors — Tobias Menzies and then Jonathan Pryce — would play the role. His chemistry with Foy was among the show’s secret weapons: The pair, beneath their shared Keep Calm reserve, burned hot, and, when reminded he was the less important member of his marriage, Philip struggled to contain his rage. Modern viewers who knew the nation’s leading couple only as cuddly grandparents saw the passion, and the rivalry, that underpinned their love. (A scene in the second season of “House of the Dragon,” in which Rhaenyra questions her husband’s loyalty to her as monarch, not just as wife, recalls Elizabeth’s aggrieved attempts to bring to heel the subject with whom she shared a life.)
Philip was among the characters most humanized by “The Crown” — not least because he had been an especially controversial royal. “I fell in love with him a bit, having thought, like a lot of Britons, that he was one thing — many think he’s a bit of a buffoon,” Smith says. (Philip’s gaffes, particularly on the subject of race, were legendary, and “The Crown” tended to swim in safer waters.)
To play a character, one must, perhaps, fall in love with him — whether he’s a vampiric prince of Westeros or simply an eclipsed husband. “I certainly wasn’t a royalist,” Smith says. “And my granddad couldn’t bear them. But I loved him. And her.”
Philip’s and Elizabeth’s deaths, in 2021 and 2022 respectively, as well as the 2023 publication of Prince Harry’s excoriating memoir “Spare,” meant that “The Crown,” last year, ended on a somewhat baleful note. And Smith, having played the role, has sympathy for all the Mountbatten-Windsors. “To be born into it without any choice — that’s why I love Philip. Because he said, ‘Fuck this! I don’t want to do that!’”
No wonder Condal eventually won Smith over to the idea of playing a rogue prince once again: If ever a character in the “Game of Thrones” universe had “fuck this” energy, it’s Daemon. And that gives Smith plenty to explore, as his rebel-hearted warrior faces down the fact that bonds of duty connect him to a wife who is in a state of mourning, and to a throne that he must protect even as it is not his to occupy.
“In his perverse way — and it is deeply perverse — Daemon thinks he’s doing the right thing,” Smith says. “And sometimes he’s just doing it because he likes that feeling of being the black sheep.” Confronted with problems he can’t fight through, Daemon promises to reveal new complications this season. “We start to see the mask slip. Life becomes more difficult, and he gets soft around the edges. He starts to unravel.”
There’s far more ahead on this journey: Condal remarks that while writing Season 2, “it became clear what we needed to do, and how to bring it to an end, and where. We have the advantage that the book is here, it’s finished, and we know where the curtain closes on this particular chapter in the Targaryen history.” (Unlike “Game of Thrones,” then, this show is unlikely to baffle and enrage fans by going off-book.)
Once his promotional obligations for “House of the Dragon”’s second season have concluded, Smith is entering production on a limited series based on the musician Nick Cave’s book “The Death of Bunny Munro.” The novel, reviewers in the U.K. have observed, is a startling excavation of misogyny and drug abuse; Smith gleefully notes what Cave has said about the production: “Finally, someone with the balls to tell this unholy tale!”
That’d be Smith: The would-be footballer who found the stage a place he could tap into things, the Doctor who leaped into the role despite being too young and too unknown, the prince who went his own way twice over, the actor who might yet hop the line to movie stardom. Someone who’s like a vampire only in his desire to suck the essence out of things to give himself life. In this new project, he says, he plays “a character who is very, very polarizing. Difficult to like.” Smith can’t wait to start.
“One has to remind oneself that you’re not saving lives here,” he says. “It’s a creative endeavor that, if you’re lucky — it’s fucking hard work, but it’s a thrilling thing to go and do every day. And it’s vivid. God, what a wonderful thing in life for it to be vivid at least. Please, God, it’s vivid.”
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From Variety US