‘House of the Dragon’ Deleted Scene ‘Changed the Course’ of How Paddy Considine Played King Viserys
House of the Dragon began with tragic bloodshed, but that was toned down from what they originally shot. King Viserys actor Paddy Considine remembers a House of the Dragon deleted scene he filmed for the pilot. It got cut out, but informed the rest of his performance throughout the season.
[Warning: This article contains spoilers for House of the Dragon.]
Considine was a guest on the Happy Sad Confused podcast on Oct. 14. Discussing his run as King Viserys on House of the Dragon, Considine revealed the deleted scene. The season finale of House of the Dragon premieres Sunday on HBO Max.
‘House of the Dragon’ deleted scene was ‘10 times more brutal,’ Paddy Considine says
In the first episode of House of the Dragon, King Viserys loses his wife, Aemma (Sian Brooke), in childbirth. His son doesn’t make it either, but the way he originally found out twisted the knife even further.
“What we shot was 10 times more brutal than what you saw,” Considine said on Happy Sad Confused. “He was 10 times more devastated than what you saw. I mean, he was inconsolable. He was absolutely distraught. There’s a scene that didn’t make the cut where I’m sitting on the bed. There’s blood on the bed and I’ve got the dagger and one of the maesters comes to tell me actually that Baelon hasn’t lived. So Viserys was hit with this double whack of devastation of his wife and then the kid, his son. Then there was this sense of heh, that cruel twist of fate of like I’m not surprised.”
The ‘House of the Dragon’ deleted scene informed Paddy Considine’s performance
Even though House of the Dragon viewers never saw that deleted scene, it stayed with Considine. He used it to motivate Viserys’s further decisions for the rest of the season.
“They cut it and probably rightly so because it just cuts down to the funeral pyre and that was probably the right choice really,” Considine said. “It was just the impact of those scenes, the amount of emotion that we put into it and the amount of effort and emotion that Sian put into it. There was such long hard days filming and she left such an impression with her work, even in the more tender scenes. She left a kind of imprint everywhere and she left this impression on me and it just changed the course of how I played the character.”
The decision Considine made after that scene was “This is it. This is the thing that this man carries the rest of his life. This is the thing that he can’t get over.”
Paddy Considine kept King Viserys’ motivation to himself
Considine said he didn’t tell House of the Dragon creator Ryan Condal or anyone else his theory. He just executed it in his remaining episodes.
My secret then became when she’s burning, it’s like I don’t want to live anymore. So when he starts to die, he’s starting to get these injuries from the throne and he’s starting to get the stuff on his back, the blistering on his back. When it starts to develop into something else, he doesn’t care. He doesn’t ask the maesters for a cure. It’s everybody else going, ‘Let’s try the leeches, let’s try this.’ He’s not. He’s just silently accepting his fate by way of punishment for what he put his wife through in those final moments. That’s how those days with Sian changed the way that I went about the character because secretly I just went, ‘This is a love story and one day he’ll be reunited.’
Paddy Considine, Happy Sad Confused, 10/14/22
