The show makers of the show revealed that there were a lot of House Of The Dragon Season 1 Deleted Scenes that were cut out from the show. And we will talk about it, the alternate deleted ending, and the deleted scenes from the whole of Season 1. Some of this stuff is from the finale but most of the deleted scenes, and the alternate takes are from earlier episodes.
Because it was so much story they were covering George RR Martin also said that he expects even more deleted scenes to be on the Blu-ray when they release that as well. So when we get those I’ll do another deleted scenes article for anything new that they haven’t revealed yet. Careful for spoilers for House Of The Dragon season 1 if you haven’t seen it yet.
House Of The Dragon Season 1 Deleted Scenes
But there were hours and hours of deleted scenes, alternate takes, and tons of stuff hitting the Cutting Room floor. But one of the biggest things was the actual ending of the finale. The House of the Dragon episode 10 ending we saw ended with Lucerys versus Aemond, Vhagar killing Arrax against Aemond’s wishes. Arrax attacked Vhagar to begin with against Lucerys’ wishes.
Turns out they don’t actually control the dragons as much as they thought they did. Viserys had a big speech about that at the beginning of episode 1.
Lucerys dies accidentally as collateral damage in the attack, and it was really a Dragon vs Dragon fight a true Dance of the dragons. And then Rhaenyra learning about it after the fact, decided to declare war on the greens. After all, whereas before she’d imply that she was going to accept the terms and attempt to avert war, even though they were always going to have the war.
The showrunner Ryan said that there had been a few different versions of the actual ending. The only thing that was always going to be the same in all the different versions was Lucerys dying. His death was always going to happen in the season finale at some point. And season 2 was always going to begin with the actual dance of the dragons.
First Deleted Ending: Ends With Aegon Being Crowned As The King
Their first version of the ending, like the first alternate version, was meant to be more like the ending of episode 9. Where they end the season with Alicent and the greens crowning Aegon II, stealing the Iron Throne is his big twist, then Rhaenyra learns about it and declares war on them. As we saw, they just use that moment for the ending of episode 9 and separated the Alicent and the Rhaenyra stories into completely different episodes.
Episode 9 was called the Green Council, it was more from Alicent’s perspective. Episode 10 was called The Black Queen, it was more from Rhaenyra’s perspective things. This, I think was a smarter move on their part, like they were already rushing through so much story already.
Second Deleted Ending: A Conversation Between Rhaenyra And Daemon
The other alternate ending was more of a minor change and it was Aemond killing Lucerys. Then inside Dragonstone during Rhaenyra’s black council meeting, around the painted table while they’re discussing what they’re gonna do next.
Rhaenyra’s response would have taken much longer because Daemon was planning on having a much larger scene with her when he entered and began telling her what had happened to Lucerys. It’s not like you wouldn’t have heard her crying when he talked to her about it.
The Original Ending: Daemon’s Actor Came Up With It
In the final version, it’s completely silent, you don’t hear what Daemon is actually saying to Rhaenyra. You just see their backs turned to the fireplace with her physical reaction, which they said was actually totally improvised by Matt Smith on the day.
Matt Smith came in on the day that they were filming this scene, called an audible, and suggested that instead of having this huge conversation about what was going on and being more deliberate about Rhaenyra’s next actions. It ended up being an amazing scene in the final version it tells you everything you need to know about where season two begins, with no dialogue needed.
Daemon Killing To Marry Laena Velaryon
Talking about the biggest deleted scenes from earlier episodes. They ended episode 5 with Rhaenyra marrying Laenor Velaryon, and Laena let Daemon know that she was interested in marrying him now that he was available. She also didn’t seem very sad about the death of his first wife. And then they just completely skip over all of Daemon and Laena’s story after that in favor of the epic time Jump at the beginning of episode 6, where everyone’s first batch of kids is huge, it was meant to be about a 10-year time jump.
Obviously, there was a ton of stuff that they skipped over for all the different storylines but just for the Daemon and Laena’s storyline by itself. The biggest missing part that they got rid of was the story of how Daemon was actually able to marry Laena. Because it was a whole bunch of stabbing and killing that Daemon had to do before that could take place.
When Laena expresses her interest in Daemon and Daemon is amenable to it like okay that sounds like a good idea, let’s do that. At that time, Laena was already betrothed to the son of the Sea Lord of Braavos. So Daemon’s way of fixing this wound up being very similar to the way that Rhaenyra helped Laenor get out of their marriage later in episode 7. Like you could see the makers taking stuff from some storylines and giving the moments to other storylines.
So after Rhaenyra’s wedding was over, Daemon came to Driftmark, and Corlys Velaryon was amenable to a match between Daemon and his daughter. Like he wanted to get his family as connected to the Iron Throne as possible, as connected to the royal family as possible. And what had happened over in Braavos is that the Sea Lord whom he had made this marriage pact for his son and his daughter had died, and the Sealord’s son had taken over and squandered all of his money. So Corlys didn’t care about Bravos anymore, but he couldn’t break the marriage pack without good cause.
So Daemon went full Rogue Prince like he pulled a very familiar move where he comes to Bravos and he goads the sea Lord’s son into a fight, attacking him and using it as an excuse to kill him, thus ending Laena’s betrothal, allowing them to get married. Its also kind of similar to the way that he dealt with his first marriage, like “oh we’ll just kill our problems away. How do we get you out of this betrothal, why don’t we just kill the person you’re betrothed to, problem solved: as I said in a very Daemon kind of way. So I think that they decided to get rid of that moment with Daemon and Laena because it was so similar to the Twist they were using for Laenor later on.
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Laena Claiming Vhagar A Bit Early
And because they wanted such an epic jarring time Jump to so much later in the timeline like that, “let’s just kind of hand wave over all this history here” And because of that, there’s also this other huge deleted scene from Daemon and Laena’s storyline where Laena claimed Vhagar when she was much much younger.
So here’s the thing with that, too there are also a couple of minor book changes that they had with Alicent and Rhaenyra’s characters and some of the younger characters as well. They did the same thing during the original Game of Thrones series, where they changed the ages of some of the characters.
In the books originally Laena claimed Vhagar in 105 AC, that’s the same year that Viserys’s first wife Aemma Arryn died in childbirth, and that was the end of episode 1 of the series. But when we get to episode 2, and we meet Laena Velaryon, she’s like a very very young child, clearly a long way off from claiming Vhagar.
They did the same thing with Rhaenyra and Alicent on the show. On the show, Alicent is way older than Rhaenyra, and she’s in her late 20s when she gets remarried to Viserys. On the show, they made it seem like Alicent was 14-15 when she got married to Viserys. But Laena claimed Vhagar when she was about 13 years old, and if you’re going by the show’s timeline, that would have been sometime between the events of episode 4 and episode 5. Like when she shows up in episode 5 to Rhaenyra’s wedding and she starts talking to Daemon, she’s a couple of years older, she’s old enough to actually start having children, and she’s been writing Vhagar for a little while already.
The main reason why they said they didn’t include her writing Vhagar in the final episodes was that they wanted Aemond to claim Vhagar at the end of episode 7, just a few episodes right after that, to feel like a much bigger deal. Kind of the same reason why they didn’t include ladies stone heart in the Game of Thrones series, because like right after that would have happened, they would have had the big Jon Snow Resurrection moment and Catelyn Stark coming back as lady stone heart would have telegraphed that too much.
Like Aemond was always going to be a much bigger character on the show in general to them through all the seasons, so they wanted to focus more on setting his character up, which is another side effect of them brushing through the story so fast.
Alicent And Rhaenyra Before Alicent And Viserys’ Marriage
There are also a bunch of deleted scenes from much earlier on too. Especially Alicent and Viserys’s marriage as well. There was a huge time Jump between episode 2 and episode 3, and at the beginning of the cut that, we actually saw Viserys had already been married to Alicent for a couple of years and her first son with him, Aegon II is having his second birthday, so like a lot of time has gone by.
In this first deleted scene, Rhaenyra meets Alicent right after the engagement is announced before the wedding ceremony in the godswood. Here they keep using this as a big location in the episodes, keep going back here.
Mythologically it’s also one of the biggest connections that they have to the Game of Thrones series in the weirwood trees, the three-eyed Raven, the children of the forest, the night King, the white walkers, the long night. And the scene would have had Rhaenyra yelling at Alicent about how much much of a betrayal it felt like. You kind of get that moment after the engagement is announced, but you don’t actually get a scene between the two of them until well after her first child has been born.
They were meant to be best friends before that, if this wasn’t clear. Like the actresses also said that they had been playing their relationship as if they were also kind of secretly in love. Like the connection had a romantic component to it, but it wasn’t as overtly sexual as you would normally think for a show like Game of Thrones, given what we just saw happen in episode 4. Given all that sister wifing in Twin sets, we see happening all over the place.
Both of the actresses said that that wasn’t on the page, like their romantic relationship before things got really awkward with the events of the show. It was just something that they chose to do on their own like they made it feel like more of a romantic connection between the two of them. And they would have made it clear during this deleted scene that Alicent didn’t want to marry her father, she was just kind of forced to do it.
But as you see in later episodes, Alicent as a character just feels like she needs to follow the rules, and do whatever everyone tells her to do. So she does whatever her father says to do even if she doesn’t really want to do it. Which is part of the reason why she gets so pissed off at Rhaenyra when she finds out about what she’s been up to in Fleabottom with Daemon Targaryen.
So if it wasn’t clear, Alicent didn’t actually want to get married to her father. She liked the attention that she was getting from the King, like she thought that she was special because of the attention, like oh, someone’s paying attention to me. This is great. She wasn’t trying to betray her friend Rhaenyra.
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Alicent And Viserys’ Wedding
The second deleted scene was the actual marriage ceremony of Alicent Hightower and Viserys Targaryen, a little while later in the timeline. They actually filmed the wedding, and Alicent’s wedding dress would have looked like a very Targaryen-themed dress done in white and red instead of black and red. All the costumes on house the dragon and Game of Thrones are fantastic, they must have spent so much money filming this scene to cut it.
We haven’t seen many actual weddings in the Game of Thrones Universe they’ve all gone terribly, the Red Wedding the purple wedding, Sansa’s Force wedding to Ramsay Bolton. I’m assuming that it’s common for Highborn ladies in Westeros to wear white to weddings, though.
Enduring the larger wedding scene, they actually filmed Rhaenyra helping Alicent get dressed in her gown. In their ritual the dressing was meant to be a parallel for Alicent helping Rhaenyra do the same thing getting dressed when she was preparing to be named the air earlier in the series and have all the Lords of the realm swear fealty to her.
So it was meant to be like this very personal moment with them together right before Alicent got married to her father. And it would have shown how close they were despite what had just happened between the two of them with the betrayal and her getting engaged to her father.
Viserys And Aegon II
The next deleted scene was after Alicent and Viserys’s wedding, with him learning that she would give birth to a son, Aegon II. It was meant to be a happy scene, like it was him celebrating that he’d have a son that would survive the birth. He’d had two male children with Aemma Arryn, his first wife and Rhaenyra’s mother, but neither one of them survived long after birth.
Mostly the blame for that lies on the Targaryen practice of marrying so closely in the family for so long. Viserys and Daemon’s parents were brother and sister. Viserys and his first wife, Aemma were first cousins. Aemma was the daughter of one of Jaehaerys’ many, many children.
Setting Up Laenor Velaryon Before His Marriage
The next deleted scene was going to be a larger introduction for Laenor Velaryon and his lover Joffrey Lonmouth, the person in episode 5 that you see Criston Cole just laying it into during The Wedding Banquet. Being named Joffrey at a royal wedding like this just doesn’t seem like a good idea in the Game of Thrones Universe (everybody having Joffrey flashbacks to Game of Thrones in the purple wedding).
I think the idea here was that they were going to do a better job of setting up Laenor before Rhaenyra met him during Viserys’ discussions with Corlys velaryon arranging their marriage.
Then after the fact, they also clarified what was really going on with Daemon when he was with Rhaenyra in Fleabottom, and they were getting it on. Matt Smith explained during this scene he was actually trying to get back at his brother like purposefully trying to rile things up causing a little bit of chaos by messing around with Rhaenyra.
And the reason why he stopped because he couldn’t metaphorically get it up, so to speak is that when they started to get hot and heavy, she actually doubled down on it and got into it, and that freaked him out a little bit and he suddenly realized how crazy what they were doing was. Like “okay maybe I’ve gone a little too far this time” and then pumps the break and takes off.
Viserys’ Last Supper
Some of the other smaller deleted scenes from later episodes also include more stuff with the actual dinner scene, like Viserys’s Last Supper. During that part of the episode, Alicent had a scene with Criston Cole where she gets really pissed off at him contrast to what we’ve seen in their relationship in the final episodes before.
And if you notice in this dinner scene you look around you don’t see Criston Cole anywhere near Alicent where usually you’d expect him to follow her around most places like a puppy. He’s been her personal kings guard on Alicent detail so to speak, ever since the time jump.
Olivia Cooke revealed that they had this funny scene where Alicent gets super pissed off at him and basically tells him to piss off, and he goes off in this funny way with his tail between his legs so to speak, like a dog who’s just been disciplined by their owner.
This is why you don’t see him when the kids start to throw down, and Aemond almost gets into a fight until Daemon steps in between them.
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