"That's a proper fookin' by the Naaaarf!"
James Norton (Ormund Hightower) has taken to Instagram to share some spoiler-y behind-the-scenes photos from the recent Season 3 finale of House of the Dragon.
The episode, "The Treasons of Tumbleton," marked Norton's last, as his scheming villain met his end at the hands (well, hand) of Ser Roderick "Roddy the Ruin" Dustin (Tommy Flanagan), who plunged a dagger where the sun don't shine when Hightower's hyper-sensitive disposition proved to be his undoing.
Both men were then finished off - much to Roddy's delight - by a blast from Ulf the White's dragon, Silverwing.
Norton captioned his photos, "Ruined by Roddy," and included a shot of himself alongside Flanagan, who wore a green glove to allow the arm Ormund lopped off during their fight scene to be digitally removed.
Norton spoke about filming his final scene during a recent interview with Variety, revealing that his character's death was originally intended to be even more brutal.
"It was a lot of fun! Tommy is a genius, I love working with him. I’ve been a fan of his work for ages. It was a lot of work going into those sequences. This show drills the stunts more than any other show I’ve ever worked on. When you think you’ve finished the stunts and are ready to go, they’re like, “See you next week!” I knew it was going to be a big, delicious death.
Before I read the script, there was a lot of chatter around how it was going to happen. I knew it was going to be very different from the books. It happens a lot with this show where they push it to the extreme. When they realize where the boundary is, they pull it back a bit. So there was originally a version where Ormund gets impaled like 20 times, and then we’re like, “That’s probably a little too much!”
"The prequel series finds the Targaryen dynasty at the absolute apex of its power, with more than 15 dragons under their yoke. Most empires—real and imagined—crumble from such heights. In the case of the Targaryens, their slow fall begins almost 193 years before the events of Game of Thrones, when King Viserys Targaryen breaks with a century of tradition by naming his daughter Rhaenyra heir to the Iron Throne. But when Viserys later fathers a son, the court is shocked when Rhaenyra retains her status as his heir, and seeds of division sow friction across the realm."
House of the Dragon season 3 sees Matt Smith, Olivia Cooke, Emma D’Arcy, Steve Toussaint, Fabien Frankel, Ewan Mitchell, Tom Glynn-Carney, Sonoya Mizuno, and Rhys Ifans reprise their respective roles. Additional returning cast includes Harry Collett, Bethany Antonia, Phoebe Campbell, Phia Saban, Jefferson Hall, and Matthew Needham.
Season 3 directors include Loni Peristere (episodes 1,6), Clare Kilner (episodes 2,3,4), Nina Lopez-Corrado (episodes 5,7), and Andrij Parekh (episode 8).