The twisted Targaryen family tree is on the way back to primetime with House of the Dragon Season 2, and HBO went all-out with the trailers to set up the Blacks vs. the Greens. With the majority of the Season 1 stars reprising their roles for the second season, Matt Smith – a.k.a. Daemon Targaryen himself – has shared the reservations he had about joining the series after the phenomenon of Game of Thrones.
Matt Smith was arguably the best-known member of the House of the Dragon cast ahead of Season 1 thanks to Doctor Who and The Crown, and readers of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood knew that anybody playing Daemon would be portraying a tricky character. According to Matt Smith to Variety, however, the complications of the Rogue Prince weren’t what concerned him about joining the first Game of Thrones spinoff. He shared what he told creators Ryan Condal and Miguel Sapochnik during the casting process:
My concern is that we’ve seen this story told. That’s the first thing I said.
It was a valid concern – Game of Thrones had only ended with its divisive series finale a year earlier in 2019 when Matt Smith met with the creators in 2020 about possibly playing Daemon. The final season heavily featured the only remaining branch of the Targaryen family tree and culminated in one of the last two killing the other. That kind of conflict already began in House of the Dragon Season 1 and is set to continue in Season 2, although on a much larger scale than Dany and Jon.
Of course, fans who were burned by the GOT finale might have been wary of House of the Dragon, not least because premiering a fantasy epic in 2022 was very different from Game of Thrones coming out of nowhere in 2011. The era of “peak TV” has ended since the final credits rolled on Thrones, as Matt Smith observed:
Audiences have changed. The way TV is consumed has changed. You can see a market saturate itself and envelop itself, and become obsolete.
Expectations are different in the House of the Dragon era vs. Game of Thrones era, not least because streaming and binge-watching are popular ways of consuming television nowadays. There are also more fantasy TV options than there were in the GOT days, ranging from Netflix’sThe Witcher to Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
Matt Smith went on to tell the outlet that while comparisons between HOTD and Thrones were “unavoidable, when you’re standing on the shoulders of a show that really got into the cultural zeitgeist of the world,” he didn’t expect his show to match its predecessor. He went on:
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.
It may be for the best that House of the Dragon can’t recreate the Game of Thrones “moment in time,” as all that love and affection for the show made disappointment in the ending hit all the harder for fans who didn’t get what they wanted from the series finale back in 2019.
The two shows are also very different, for all that they have the same theme song and are set in the Seven Kingdoms. At the very least, there are a whole lot more dragons and plenty of incest that isn’t considered taboo in the show set centuries before Jon Snow and Co. took center stage in Game of Thrones!
Fortunately for fans who have been missing House of the Dragon for the better part of two years now, Season 2 will arrive in the 2024 TV schedule on Sunday, June 16 at 9 p.m. ET. If you want to revisit the first season (or full run of Game of Thrones) in the meantime, you can do so streaming with a Max subscription.