Ewan Mitchell helps Aemond show his true colors in ‘House of the Dragon’
LONDON — Ewan Mitchell shares few similarities with Aemond Targaryen, his unhinged character on HBO’s “House of the Dragon.” The British actor, 29, is soft-spoken, thoughtful and quick with a “thank you.” His hair is currently brown rather than Targaryen blond, although he says the color is actually left over from filming Justine Triet’s upcoming psychological thriller “Fonda.” Although he is very different from the power-hungry second son he plays on TV, Mitchell understands him.
“I always empathize with that little kid in Season 1,” he says, speaking from London’s 180 House on a sunny day in July. “He was this neglected, bullied boy. He was never given a dragon egg. So from the beginning he recognized that he was on the back foot, and he was bullied for being different. What’s nice about Season 3 is it’s showing Aemond’s true colors.”
Early in Season 3, Aemond asserted his dominance over his mother Alicent (Olivia Cooke) with a gasp-inducing kiss on the mouth, a moment Mitchell compares to Michael Corleone’s iconic kiss on Fredo in “The Godfather Part II.” The disgraced prince regent left King’s Landing for Harrenhal in search of Daemon (Matt Smith), only to murder Ser Simon Strong and his sons instead. His fray with the Strong family was triumphant, but left Aemond with a wound in his side. He begged the castle’s mysterious inhabitant Alys Rivers (Gayle Rankin) to help him before vanishing for the next two episodes.
In Episode 5, Aemond is back. At first, he appears wounded and broken. But he ably defends Alys from a group of invaders, relying on muscle memory and — perhaps — a sense of honor to pay her back for saving his life.
“I liken Harrenhal to the White Lotus of Westeros,” Mitchell says. “It’s a place you go for a retreat. You have all of your toxins drawn out of you. You have to confront them head on. You discover like the darkest, deepest places of yourself. And the general manager of that place is Alys Rivers.”
In Episode 5, Aemond (Mitchell) fights off invaders, saving Alys’ life.
(Theo Whiteman / HBO)
The upcoming episodes will keep Aemond at Harrenhal with Alys and expand on the events of George R.R. Martin’s 2018 book “Fire & Blood,” on which the series is based. Showrunner Ryan Condal wanted to explore what wasn’t in Martin’s fictional history of Westeros.
“We knew from the book that he goes to Harrenhal and effectively disappears, at least from the interactive narrative,” Condal says, speaking later over video call. “It’s thought that he establishes some relationship with Alys Rivers. We had that as a baseline, but the idea was: ‘Where can we take Aemond from here?’”
He adds that there was “a danger of the character becoming an anime villain,” which the writers wanted to undercut. “He looks a certain way,” Condal says. “He has this eye patch. He rides this Godzilla-sized dragon. And he’s done some pretty reprehensible things.”
But the writers wanted to go beyond Aemond’s surface, to “a different place and excavate that trauma and vulnerability.”
Mitchell says Alys is the key to Aemond finding himself. “We know his dragon Vhagar is missing,” he says. “And if Aemond is nothing without his dragon, then does he really deserve her? We’ve got to challenge what we know of the character already … Vhagar was the wind in his sails.”
He compares Aemond with Spider-Man, an oddly aligned character. “With great power comes great responsibility to wield that power,” Mitchell says. “He’s got to be able to show he can control it effectively. That’s what he wanted to prove throughout Season 1 and 2.”
He laughs: “It’s just like ‘Spider-Man 2.’ I find it really interesting building up this character over two seasons to bring him back down.”
“I find it really interesting building up this character over two seasons to bring him back down,” Mitchell says of Aemond, who is facing turbulent times in Season 3.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Condal adds, “He’s feeling isolated and alone and he possibly has made an enemy of his family. And then this woman saves him. He feels this sudden magnetic draw to her. In the episodes that follow, we will further excavate that relationship. It’s one of the most surprising and engaging and emotional stories we have this season.”
Mitchell first appeared as Aemond, the son of Viserys and Alicent and the brother of Aegon II, in the eighth episode of Season 1. He was originally played by Leo Ashton, who Mitchell says “really set up the character for me.” Production had already begun when Mitchell auditioned, first with a self-tape and then for the producers. Initially, he didn’t know which character he was up for.
“I knew this character was the younger brother and that was like a theme of the first season and going through further seasons,” Mitchell recalls. “The second son out to prove his worth.”
Mitchell’s audition was memorable. “He came into the room in character and he scared all of us,” Condal says. “I remember the first question that I asked [our casting director] after he left was, ‘Is he always like that?’ Because it felt like he had gone to such a dark place just to do the audition. When I spoke to him later, I loved how different the person was on the phone versus the person I met in the room.”
To play Aemond, Mitchell looked at MMA and cage fighters to hone in on the character’s agile, brutal fighting style. He trained physically to make Aemond lean but also strong and imposing. He took inspiration from paintings, including Alexandre Cabanel’s 1847 work “The Fallen Angel,” which depicts the devil after his fall from heaven.
“There’s this tear in his eye and you don’t know if he’s feeling sorry for himself or he’s looking at things to come,” Mitchell says. “Is he thinking about the harm he’s going to inflict in retaliation? That was something I wanted to do in Season 2. It contrasts his muscular physique. It’s a mixture between vulnerability and sheer muscle.”
Season 2 saw Aemond purposefully incinerating his brother, leaving him badly burned, and decimating the Riverlands while on Vhagar. The character was grappling for power, even if it meant brutalizing his own family. Condal hints that a reckoning with Aegon will come.
“In the great tradition of ‘Game of Thrones,’ I feel like that is a fairly safe bet,” he says. “Characters are scattered all over the map and then slowly find themselves being brought back together, but in different forms. That was always something we were talking about doing with Aemond and Aegon.”
To play Aemond, Mitchell looked at MMA and cage fighters to hone in on the character’s agile, brutal fighting style. He also took inspiration from paintings, including Alexandre Cabanel’s 1847 work “The Fallen Angel.” (Jennifer McCord/For The Times)
Mitchell sees Aemond as a product of his circumstances, rather than just a murdering psychopath. He was bullied as a child and coddled by his mother, but never received the unconditional love he craved. He was taken to brothels from an early age. He lost an eye. And he grew up in the midst of a brutal war between the Greens and the Blacks. Now he has to reckon with what he’s done.
“You might not understand all of the things he does,” Mitchell says. “And you might not feel like you’re supposed to understand all the things he does. But you do feel something for him. In the moment he saves Alys, maybe there is a redeemable Aemond in there somewhere.”
Cooke says she loves working opposite Mitchell thanks to his complex approach to the character.
“He has such intensity and helps me as an actor in playing Alicent to feel like I’m completely on the back foot,” she says in a voice memo. “It’s filled with tension trying to guess what he’s going to do. Yet in reality, he is the most gentle, lovely, quiet, beautiful person. He’s a joy to work with and I think he makes such interesting choices outside of ‘House of the Dragon.’”
Between Seasons 2 and 3, Mitchell filmed Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights.” He had previously worked with the filmmaker on 2023’s “Saltburn,” for which he auditioned using a Harold Pinter monologue. For “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell simply texted Mitchell asking him to play Joseph, a servant in the Earnshaw house, whose sexual depravity electrifies Cathy.
Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) and Alys (Gayle Rankin) share a tender moment in Episode 5.
(Theo Whiteman / HBO)
“I was like, ‘If you asked me to shine your shoes, Emerald, I would do that,’” Mitchell says. “All of her characters are so vibrant and so nuanced, and there is such a vision you see in her films. She’s a one-of-a-kind, singular visionary. I’ve learned so much working with Emerald that I’ve taken forward in my career.”
One of those things was a more playful, loose approach to acting. During his first two seasons of “House of the Dragon,” Mitchell felt locked into a particular performance. “I learned the scripts verbatim,” he says. “Aemond is such a calculating character and everything he does is premeditated. He’s so in control of himself. I found myself offering up the same take every single take.”
After working with Fennell on “Saltburn” and “Wuthering Heights,” Mitchell felt more freedom. She encouraged him to give a range of performances on set, allowing her to find the character during the editing process. He brought that with him to the third season of “House of the Dragon.”
“With Aemond being so unsure of himself, it happened more naturally,” he says. “He’s learning new things about himself. I was really open to finding the scene organically on the day and not coming in with any preconceived choices. And I found so much more enjoyment in it.”
Condal observed Mitchell’s looser approach. “I don’t think Ewan was ever rigid,” Condal says. “But what I saw happen over the seasons was someone learning from their professional experience. As a massive fan of Emerald Fennell’s work, I can see how being in that very different crucible could help him become his best version. We probably demanded the most out of Ewan in Season 3 than any of the other actors.”
Mitchell says working with Emerald Fennell helped him take a looser approach to acting.
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
Since wrapping Season 3 last fall, Mitchell has stayed busy. He filmed “The Way of the Runner” in China with first-time filmmaker Yutong Bai, Gareth Evans’ remake of the 1960s Japanese crime film “A Colt Is My Passport” in Wales, Luna Carmoon’s sophomore feature “To Make Ends Meat” in London and Can Aydin’s directorial debut “The Healer” in Budapest. He then flew to France to work with Triet, an experience he loved because she shot on film. “Knowing you’ve only got a limited amount of time, there’s something beautiful about the imperfections of performances,” he says. “There was such a great energy with everyone in the room.”
Mitchell has been attracted to performing for as long as he can remember. Growing up in Derby, England, he admired films like “Citizen Kane” and “Taxi Driver” because they centered on “characters you don’t completely understand.” He appreciates the scope of projects he’s done so far, from the massive scale of production on “House of the Dragon” to smaller art house films.
“I love working as much as I can and learning,” he says. “I’d love to keep working with debut directors. After the recent films I’ve done and seeing ‘Obsession’ and ‘Backrooms,’ it’s really motivating seeing what they can do.”
Although Mitchell looks nothing like Aemond, he is frequently recognized. Someone stopped him on his way here today to ask for a photo. “I think it’s the chin,” he grins. He knows he’s inextricably linked to the character, for better or worse. He can’t give much away about what’s to come in Season 3, but Aemond is certainly not down for the count.
“What makes him so dangerous is that just when you think he has nothing left in the tank, it’s like, ‘Guess again,’” Mitchell says. “It’s not a question of whether he’s going to do evil. It’s inevitable that he will do it. And it will be brutal and it will be fast.”
He pauses, unsure of what he can reveal. “I don’t want to spoil anything,” he says carefully, “but I can’t wait for people to see what Harrenhal has in store for him.”
